Science

Recently, antivaxxers have been expressing their impatience with HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s progress eliminating vaccines. It was inevitable. Has MAHA fallen?

The post “MAHA has fallen”? Antivaxxers are getting very impatient with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

A Princeton team built a new tantalum-silicon qubit that survives for over a millisecond, far surpassing today’s best devices. The design tackles surface defects and substrate losses that have limited transmon qubits for years. Easy to integrate into existing quantum chips, the approach could make processors like Google’s vastly more powerful.

Electrons can freeze into strange geometric crystals and then melt back into liquid-like motion under the right quantum conditions. Researchers identified how to tune these transitions and even discovered a bizarre “pinball” state where some electrons stay locked in place while others dart around freely. Their simulations help explain how these phases form and how they might be harnessed for advanced quantum technologies.

Astronomers have, for the first time, recorded the moment a star’s explosion broke through its surface. The nearby supernova, SN 2024ggi, revealed a surprisingly olive-shaped blast when studied with ESO’s Very Large Telescope. The discovery helps scientists better understand the forces that drive massive stars to explode and underscores how quick international cooperation can lead to groundbreaking results.

The “Seven Sisters” have far more relatives than anyone imagined. Using NASA and ESA space telescopes, astronomers found thousands of hidden stars linked to the Pleiades, forming a colossal stellar complex. The discovery expands the cluster’s size by a factor of 20 and offers a new way to trace the shared origins of stars—including our own Sun.

In March of 2024 the [DESI collaboration](https://www.desi.lbl.gov/collaboration/) dropped a bombshell on the cosmological community: slim but significant evidence that dark energy might be getting weaker with time.

Swift observations with the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) have revealed the explosive death of a star just as the blast was breaking through the star’s surface. For the first time, astronomers unveiled the shape of the explosion at its earliest, fleeting stage. This brief initial phase wouldn’t have been observable a day later and helps address a whole set of questions about how massive stars go supernova.

So I got an email from Adam Reiss. You know, the guy who was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics along with Saul Perlmutter and Brian Schmidt for discovering the rate of cosmic expansion is accelerating. He pointed out a few issues with the decelerating Universe paper, and with his permission I'd like to share them with you.

I have loved this song ever since, years ago, an Irish friend gave me a CD containing it. This is an instrumental version with Seamus Ennis on uilleann pipes, also called “Irish bagpipes,” accompanied by his daughter Catherine Ennis on the organ.  I have a recorded version but found this live version; I’ve started the video at 3:08 when the song begins.  I find it mournful but not depressing, and incredibly beautiful, even though the melody repeats itself many times. The uilleann pipes, to me, are far more mellifluous than Scottish bagpipes. And here they meld perfectly with the organ.

As far as I can find out, “Easter Snow” is a traditional Irish song whose name has been corrupted. It also apparently had words.  One site says this:

“Paddy Tunney’s mother Brigid appears to have been the oral the source of this in Ireland; another version was recorded in New Brunswick, Canada. Sam Henry included a 1925 version in his ‘Songs of the People’ column in the ‘Northern Constitution’ newspaper under the title Westersnow and an earlier one was discovered in J.P. McCall’s unpublished songbook, where it was said to have come from ‘County Carlow/County Wicklow’, there given the title Esther Snow. Collector Sean O’Boyle wrote of it:

‘Estersnowe is the name of a townland in Roscommon. Originally the place was known by its Gaelic name Diseart Nuadhan (St. Nuadha’s Hermitage) but in the process of adaptation to the English language in Elizabethan times, it became known as Issertnowne. By the nineteenth century the people, when speaking English, called it Estersnowe and rationalised that strange name into Easter Snow. In County Antrim where there is a strong Scots influence, the song is known as Wester Snow.

An instrumental version of the tune is in the Standford-Petrie Collection with two titles in Irish- Sneachta Casga (a literal translation of Easter Snow) and Diseart Nuadhan (the original Gaelic name of the district). The final folk etymology of the name was one I heard from the Donegal Fiddler John Doherty, who played the tune for me but did not know the words of the song. He called the tune Esther Snow and told me that Esther was “a most beautiful lady, with skin as white as the snow.” And then with equal authority, he added: “She was six foot one.” The prosody of the song is particularly interesting, being an echo of the Ochtfhoclach form with double assonantal rhymes (Aicill Dubalta). The double rhymes occur in this song only at the line endings:

Start at the song by pressing the arrow below. There are other instrumental as well as vocal versions on the Internet, but to me this one is by far the best (Seamus was largely responsible for reviving the uilleann pipes as an instrument).  If you have a cat, I’d be interested in knowing how it reacts when it hears this song.

Researchers combined deep learning with high-resolution physics to create the first Milky Way model that tracks over 100 billion stars individually. Their AI learned how gas behaves after supernovae, removing one of the biggest computational bottlenecks in galactic modeling. The result is a simulation hundreds of times faster than current methods.

Researchers combined deep learning with high-resolution physics to create the first Milky Way model that tracks over 100 billion stars individually. Their AI learned how gas behaves after supernovae, removing one of the biggest computational bottlenecks in galactic modeling. The result is a simulation hundreds of times faster than current methods.

LHAASO has uncovered that micro-quasars, black holes feeding on companion stars, are powerful PeV particle accelerators. Their jets produce ultra-high-energy gamma rays and protons that exceed long-held expectations. Precise cosmic-ray measurements reveal a new high-energy component, suggesting multiple sources within the Milky Way. These findings finally tie the “knee” structure to black hole jet systems.

Here we have the Triggernometry duo (Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster) questioning astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson about his views on gender (the full interview is here).  Tyson seems quite agitated, loud, and even patronizing, but largely misses the points that gender-critical people are making. For example, he begins with his infamous argument that sex (or gender; he conflates them by bringing up sex chromosomes) is really a spectrum because people decide on a daily basis how male or how female they feel.  Well, I’m not sure how many people do that (I don’t), but Tyson seems to be arguing that people consider this supposed daily switch of gender is a subject of deep concern.

It isn’t.  Tyson doesn’t understand that what people are concerned with is not transitory fluctuations of “maleness or femaleness,” but the claim that people claim to be members of a sex that doesn’t correspond to their non-natal sex, and thus demand that they have the same privileges as members of that non-natal sex. That includes the “right,” if you’re a trans-identified male, for example, to inhabit “women’s spaces.”  Some people are also concerned with requirements that they use special pronouns or address people in specific ways according to their gender (I don’t care much about this when addressing people directly, but it becomes problematic in other situations).

Why do people care? Not because of what Tyson says. They care about male versus female natal (“biological”) sex because of sports participation, changing rooms, jails, rape counseling or battered women’s shelters, and for some, restrooms.  The only one of these issues Tyson mentions is the most inconsequential of all: restrooms. He says he’s speaking of “gender expression,” but since that includes trans people, he has to take them into account, too.  And if you do that, then, yes, some sanctions are in order. In fact, the International Olympic Committee is poised to ban people from competing in sports reserved for members of their non-natal sex.

Kisin simply dismisses Tyson’s argument by saying he doesn’t know anybody who wants to prevent people from dressing as they want, behaving as they want, or using the names they want. Kisin then makes the point I made above: the issue of sex-restricted spaces and the issues of fairness that mandates their creation.  Kisin then adds another area of sex-restricted spaces, at least in the UK: positions that are restricted for one sex or another, like positions in Parliament.  I didn’t know that, or whether it’s still true, but if there are female-only positions in Parliament (or diversity targests elsewhere), presumably those would be restricted to biological women. Kisin later says he’s not in favor of  sex “quotas”, but given that they exist, how are we supposed to deal with trans people?

Instead of taking this on board, Tyson is determined to say that all these problems are fixable. For bathrooms, for example, he says that the solution is single-person bathrooms or multi-gender bathrooms that members of both sexes can use at the same time.  The former solution is okay by me, but not by everyone. The latter one, however, comes with problems, as many women simply don’t want to use multi-gender or multi-sex bathrooms for reasons they’ve given in detail. (Tyson seems to think, for example, that urinals with partitions between them is one solution for a multi-sex bathroom, but I, for one, wouldn’t want to use those.)

As for sports, Tyson says that there are solutions, and these involve not dividing sports by sex but by things like hormone ratios.  That, of course, would lead to more than two classes of sports, and is useless anyway because anybody who’s gone through male puberty could adjust his testosterone ratio down so that it would fall into the female range (I’m not sure how easy this is).  More important, once you’ve gone through male puberty, you are on average stronger, larger, and faster than natal women regardless of your hormone titer. So that is not a fix. (I’ve suggested another fix, like an “other” class, but that doesn’t seem acceptable.)

Kisin points this out the persistence of sex differences even with hormones, but Tyson’s solution is simply “find ways to slice the population in ways so that whatever the event is. . . is interestingly contested.” Tyson’s example is weight classes in wrestling. But Kisin points out that this is not a solution because matching men and women by weight alone would result in unfair victories for men. And of course men’s and women’s wrestling are still kept separate.

By taking up this issue, it’s clear that Tyson is indeed addressibg trans issues and not just temporal fluctuations in one’s gender identity. He’s sufficiently optimistic to think that creative solutions will solve all of these problems. Perhaps, but the problems exist now, and we have to find solutions for them that can work now. 

Tyson takes up the questions of quotas, and says, properly, that if we want equity, then we have to determine why underrepresentation of certain groups exists. My claim is that yes, we need to know that before we do anything to create equity, because different groups may have different abilities and preferences that lead to differences in representation not caused by bigotry. Kisin responds, properly, “The question is: Female shortlists exist. Should biological males be able to enter those female shortlists?”  Again, Tyson avoids answering that question, which is one we need to deal with now. Tyson’s only answer is “We’re in a transitional period. So we have to figure that out.”  “Figuring these things out,” apparently means that we will find a solution that gets rid of men’s versus women’s sports, or male cersus female jails. (The jail issue doesn’t arise.)  The IOC has solved the problem with blanket bans, and that seems like a good solution to me.

Tyson doesn’t seem to realize the extent of the problem, asserting that all playing fields can be “fixed,” and fixed in a way different than anything we can imagine now. But for things like jails, sports, and changing rooms, the “progressive” (yes, he uses that word) fix may be the fix that many of us have already hit on.  Keeping male versus female sports separate, for example, doesn’t seem to me to be “regressive” as opposed to Tyson’s solution based on hormone ratios, which is not “progressive” but bonkers.

Electrons can freeze into strange geometric crystals and then melt back into liquid-like motion under the right quantum conditions. Researchers identified how to tune these transitions and even discovered a bizarre “pinball” state where some electrons stay locked in place while others dart around freely. Their simulations help explain how these phases form and how they might be harnessed for advanced quantum technologies.

Researchers at KRISS observed water’s rapid freeze–melt cycles under ultrahigh pressure and discovered Ice XXI, the first new ice phase found in decades. Using advanced high-pressure tech and microsecond XFEL imaging, they uncovered complex crystallization pathways never seen before. Ice XXI’s structure resembles the high-pressure ice found inside Jupiter and Saturn’s moons, hinting at planetary science implications.

Researchers at KRISS observed water’s rapid freeze–melt cycles under ultrahigh pressure and discovered Ice XXI, the first new ice phase found in decades. Using advanced high-pressure tech and microsecond XFEL imaging, they uncovered complex crystallization pathways never seen before. Ice XXI’s structure resembles the high-pressure ice found inside Jupiter and Saturn’s moons, hinting at planetary science implications.

Keep an eye on the sky Sunday night and early Monday morning for the Leonid meteors, and a possible second auroral storm. Once every other generation, the Lion roars. If skies are clear Monday morning, keep an eye out for one of the best annual November showers, the Leonid meteors. Also as an extra treat, the skies may stream with aurora once again.

We have some diverse photos by biologist Scott Ritchie from Cairns in Australia. Scott’s captions are indented and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them. Scott’s Facebook page, on which he posts many photos, is here.

I have one batch of photos left, so send ’em if you got ’em. Thanks!  Scott’s text:

I had promised Phil Venables that I would get him in for on Cheynes Beach, WA [Western Australia], so here it is! What a great spot for landscapes, plants and wildlife! Mammals, from the small (Honey Possum) to the huge (S. Right Whale). And I managed to photograph 1 of the 3 skulking birds, the Western Bristlebird. Here are some of my favourites images.

The plants and the landscapes were brilliant. A must visit area:

From the large (Southern Right Whale, Eubalaena australis)…

. . . to the small (Honey Possum, Tarsipus rostratus, feeding on Waratah Banksia, Banksia coccinea):

. . . to the creepy…This huge skink snuck out from under the cabin and bit my wife’s foot!

. . . . and the beautiful (Waratah Banksia)…

Cheynes Beach has them all!:

First cute. I was fortunate to get get shots of this small Honey Possum feeding on the Waratah Banksia during the 1st light of dawn:

This small marsupial comes out at dusk and feeds on nectar and pollen through wee hours of dawn:

Mouse like:

With a very long tongue for nectar:

During our 1st sundowners, we saw a SR Whale breech!:

Two days later we discovered that they came just off shore at Tourist Rocks. They basically wallowed around like giant pigs. But I do like the cloud reflections on the whales back.:

Birds enjoyed the banksia too. A White-cheeked Honeyeater [Phylidonyris niger] getting ready for flight:

And chased each other around the banksias:

But the larger Western Wattlebirds [Anthochaera lunulata] chased them, and any bird that landed on a banksia flower:

A male Red-winged Fairywren [Malurus elegans] used old banksia cones as a lookout post:

The typical pose and photo of the Western Bristlebird [Dasyornis longirostris] as it runs down the sand trail:

He stopped just long enough to me to get this shot. Thanks for thinking of me:

The grass yards of the cabins attracted birds. I was lucky to get a nice close-up of a Brown Quail [Synoicus ypsilophorus]:

And a Common Bronzewing [Phaps chalcoptera] at dusk:

Most people interested in space exploration already know lunar dust is an absolute nightmare to deal with. We’re already reported on numerous potential methods for dealing with it, from 3D printing landing pads so we don’t sand blast everything in a given area when a rocket lands, to using liquid nitrogen to push the dust off of clothing. But the fact remains that, for any long-term presence on the Moon, dealing with the dust that resides there is one of the most critical tasks. A new paper from Dr. Slava Turyshev of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who is enough of a polymath that our last article about his research was covering a telescope at the solar gravitational lens, updates our understanding of the physical properties of lunar dust, providing more accurate information that engineers can use to design the next round of rovers and infrastructure to support human expansion to our nearest neighbor.

Dark matter may be invisible, but scientists are getting closer to understanding whether it follows the same rules as everything we can see. By comparing how galaxies move through cosmic gravity wells to the depth of those wells, researchers found that dark matter appears to behave much like ordinary matter, obeying familiar physical laws. Still, the possibility of a hidden fifth force lingers, one that must be very weak to have evaded detection so far.