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Many teachers are panicking over AI (artificial intelligence), and for good reason. This goes beyond students using AI to cheat on their homework or write their essays for them. If you have AI essentially think for you, then you will not learn to think. On the other hand optimists point out that AI can be a powerful tool to aid in learning. It all comes down to how we use, regulate, and manage our AI tools.

The cautionary approach was captured well, I think, by Mark Crislip in this SBM commentary, in which worries about the effects of AI on doctor education. How will a new generation of physicians learn how to think like expert clinicians if they can have AIs do all their clinical thinking for them? My question is – is AI fundamentally different than all the other technological advances that have come before. Did calculators take away our ability to do math? The answer appears to be no. Students still gain basic math skills at the same rate with or without access to calculators. But there are lots of confounding factors here, and so some teachers still warn of allowing kids access to calculators too soon. Others point out that access to calculators has simply shifted our math abilities, away from basic operations toward more modeling, problem solving, and complex concepts. It seems we are in the middle of the same exact conversation about AI.

We can also think about things like GPS. My ability to navigate from point A to point B without GPS, or to navigate with maps, has definitely declined. But using GPS has also made my navigating to unfamiliar locations easier and more efficient. I would not want to go back to a world without it.

But is AI different because it is not about some narrow specific skill but about fundamental skills like writing, arguing, and thinking? I think the answer is – it could be. At the very least we cannot assume that it isn’t. We don’t want to look back in 20 years and realize we raised a generation that is intellectually crippled by previous standards. It does not seem prudent to just hope that this is not the case and it will all work out, like it did for calculators.

Part of the problem is that AI technology is developing very fast, and our culture and institutions do not have the time to adapt. Regulations, if any are needed or would be helpful, are also lagging behind. In fact it seems that the tech industry has been successful in cutting off any serious regulations at the knees. They have a point that sloppy regulations could hamper innovation and cede a vital emerging industry to our competitors. But they present this as a false choice, with the only other option to just trust them and have essentially no regulation. They want us to replicate what happened with social media, or with crypto, where lack of effective regulations turned what could have been useful tools into…something else. It is no surprise that recent surveys find people are more nervous than optimistic about the net effects of AI.

It is hard to know what the long term effect of the recent judgement against META and Google will be, but a court did find that these companies were “negligent” in protecting children from their products. These products have been deliberately optimized for addictiveness. Algorithms provide a bottomless scroll of content designed to outrage people, or drag them down a rabbit hole of increasing radicalization – whatever maximizes their engagement.  The effects on individuals and society do not seem to have factored in.

As with so many complex and technological issues, we seem to be perpetually stuck between two extremes. On the one hand we have tech bros unfettered in their attempts to “move fast and break things” and then use their billions to buy up media outlets and politicians to fend off any regulations. On the other we have politicians who may or may not be well-meaning, but either way seem to lack the knowledge and expertise to effectively regulate these new technologies. So their clumsy attempts at regulation backfire, and are used to skuttle any further regulation attempts. This is happening during a time of intense political polarization and the collapse, in many ways, of effective legislating.

What we want is a third option – effective, narrow, targeted regulation informed by experts with meaningful metrics that prevent abuse and harm with a minimal effect on innovation. Of course, this is not easy. It requires hard work, lots of consultation and discussion, and rounds of experimentation, evaluation, and adjustment. But that is what our complex world requires. Perhaps we are just not up to it.

The academic world also needs a carefully calibrated and thoughtful response. I do think we can leverage AI as a tool to improve education, to make it more personal and adaptive. But at the same time we need to avoid or minimize the obvious potential downsides. I do think it is a good idea for young children to avoid certain technologies while their brains are still developing. We need to maximize their use of verbal, math, and cognitive skills so that their brains will maximally develop these abilities. Then we can phase in technologies as tools they can use to be more effective. Start too young, however, and technology becomes a crutch, and their skills not only atrophy – they never develop in the first place.

In fact we need to think carefully about this digital virtual world we are creating for ourselves. Yes, this technology provides amazing tools and opportunities for engagement and entertainment. But they are also a soporific, lulling us into contentment for a small and isolated existence. I worry about a generation that never knows anything else.

Education is an opportunity to prevent such a digital dystopia, by not only providing the opportunity but the necessity that children do physical activities, get out into nature, communicate with actual people, and use every cognitive skill they have. We obviously have to introduce them to technology along the way, and in fact there is no way to avoid it. It is embedded out there in the world, and children do not live at school. So we also need to teach children to use technology responsibly and effectively. Meanwhile school is a place where they use and develop other abilities.

We have to be thoughtful about this. It is doubtful that just going with the flow down the path of least resistance (and maximal profits for the tech industry) will lead to the world we want to have.

The post AI And Schools first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

As we anticipate the Artemis II launch, now slated for early April with plans to take four astronauts on a trip around the Moon and back to Earth, NASA has been unveiling some significant changes to its plans for returning to the Moon and beyond. If you have fallen behind these announcements, here is a summary of the important bits.

Artemis II will continue as planned, marking the first crewed deep space mission since 1972 (Apollos 17). The original plan was for Artemis III to land on the Moon in 2027, but this mission has been pushed to an Artemis IV mission in 2028. A new Artemis III mission has been inserted – this will go only to low Earth orbit (LEO) and will test the integration of all the systems necessary to land on the Moon. This will include docking with one or both of the two landers, one being built by SpaceX and one by Blue Origin. This sounds like a really good idea, and it did seem unusual that they were planning on going straight to the Moon without ever test docking with the lander.

Even though landing on the Moon will be delayed by at least a year, NASA says this will set them up to have at least annual landings on the Moon after that, with a goal of a landing every six months. The reason for this frequent pace is the the more recent announcement by NASA last week – that they are putting on pause plans for a Lunar Gateway in lunar orbit and instead are going to focus on building a permanent Moon base near the lunar south pole.

In order to make this possible, and to support the future Moon base (no word yet on whether this will be called Moon Base Alpha, as it should) NASA plans about 30 uncrewed robotic landings on the Moon every year. They will be scoping out the location for the base and delivering equipment and supplies.

What about the Space Launch System (SLS)? When hearing these plans one of my first questions was – are they going to do this all with the SLS? Each SLS launch costs $4.1 billion, with the cost of the single-use ship itself being $2.2-2.5 billion. This is one of the biggest criticisms of the SLS system – they are designed as single-use rockets. Meanwhile, the rocket industry has moved on to reusable rockets, which dramatically reduces the cost. As of now, NASA has approved SLS launches through Artemis V. After that they have not committed to a specific plan. But – they have stated that their goal is to transition to “commercial hardware.” This almost certainly means SpaceX and Starship. I guess they cannot fully commit because Starship is still in development. But if it is ready in time, it seems likely NASA will start relying on Starships to get to the Moon.

This makes a lot of sense. SpaceX’s lander is really a modified Starship – it is stripped of anything it needs to land back on the Earth and is optimized for landing on the airless lunar surface. So – why go all the way to the Moon then dock with a Starship lander to land on the Moon. Why not just dock with the Starship in LEO then take the lunar-modified Starship all the to the Moon and then down to the lunar surface? That seems to be what NASA is planning. For now they will use the SLS to get into LEO, then go the rest of the way on a modified Starship. After Artemis V they may take one Starship into LEO and another to the Moon. They are not fully committing to SpaceX because they don’t want to give them a de-facto monopoly, so the door is open for other companies to compete for this service.

The apparent plans are for the base to be on the surface near the south pole. NASA has been investigating lunar lava tubes as a potential location for a moon base, but there are not identified sites or specific plans right now. This means the surface base will have to be heavily shielded. Perhaps the permanent presence will allow them to build a future base inside a lava tube, which would be much better protected from radiation and micrometeors.

Once all this is worked out, and we have a lunar base serviced by a system to frequently land crew on the surface and return them to Earth, NASA plans to use that lunar base as a stepping stone to Mars. This makes great sense. Remember – 90% of the energy you need to get anywhere in the solar system you expend just getting into LEO. Getting off the lunar surface is relatively easy. This means that a lunar base is an excellent platform from which to launch ships throughout the solar system, including Mars. A ship launching from the Moon can use most of its fuel getting to Mars faster, by spending more of that fuel accelerating to Mars then decelerating to insert into Martian orbit. This is critical because getting to Mars fast is the best defense against radiation exposure by the astronauts.

Along those lines NASA has also announced their plans to use nuclear power in space. This has two components – the first is using nuclear power for the Moon base itself. This is a great idea because you do not want to rely on fuel, which is expensive to ship to the Moon. Solar power on the Moon can be great, but you only see sunlight half the time. This is actually part of the reason to build the base at the south pole, where there are high peak regions that see sunlight 90% of the time. That will likely be an important source of power for the base. The other reason is that the poles also have deep craters that see light 0% of the time, which means there may be some frozen water there, which can be mined as a resource of the base. But even 90% sunlight still means 2-3 days with no sun, which would require significant battery backup. This is fine, but a mini nuclear plant (like the kind of thing you would have on a nuclear submarine) could provide years of reliable power for a lunar base.

The second use of nuclear power in space is for their planned nuclear electric propulsion spaceship. NASA plans for Space Reactor-1 (SR-1) Freedom, a ship propelled by a nuclear electric engine, to be launched in 2028. Nuclear propulsion has been long anticipated, and honestly we should have developed it long ago. This gets beyond the limits of chemical propulsion, and would cut the travel time to Mars. SR-1 Freedom will fly to Mars, and take 1 year to get there. This trip is optimized for efficiency, not speed, as it is a test mission. Once mature it is estimated that nuclear propulsion will reduce a typical trip to Mars from 7-9 months down to 3-4 months, with a theoretical advanced system getting to Mars in 45 days. Now we’re talking.

This also relates to why a lunar base is so important to Mars missions. Nuclear engines are efficient, but do not have the thrust to launch from Earth’s surface into orbit. You would have to launch any such vehicle with chemical fuel then switch to nuclear for the trip to Mars. But – if you are already on the lunar surface, you still need chemical rockets, but only small boosters rather than something the size of SLS or Starship.

Taking all of this into account, it really does seem that NASA has a well-thought out plan for developing the infrastructure to maintain a presence on the Moon and for missions to Mars (and potentially other solar system destinations). This is much better than the one-off (so-called flags and footprints) missions of the past. Honestly, this is what I naively expected would happen back in the 1970s or 80s to follow up the Apollo missions. It took 50 years longer than expected, but it’s good to see happening now. I know not everyone agrees with the priority of sending any people into space, and would rather have an entirely robotic space program, but that is a discussion for another day.

The post NASA Unveils New Moon Plans first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

Last year the inner solar system had an interstellar visitor – 3I/Atlas (which stands for the third interstellar object which was discovered by the Atlas telescope). The third ever of anything is by definition a rare event, and so this was scientifically exciting. The comet came into the inner solar system, passing close to Jupiter and Mars, but not to the Earth, went behind the sun, then emerged on its path away from the sun. It is now headed for the orbit of Jupiter and out of the solar system. At first 3I/Atlas displayed a number of minor anomalies. It was behaving sort of like a comet, but with some differences. This fits well, however, with the main hypothesis that it is an interstellar comet – so it’s a comet, but may have a different composition from comets that were formed in our own solar system. This is not almost certainly the case – the comet comes from the thick disc of the galaxy, likely from a low metallicity star system, and has likely been travelling through interstellar space for billions of years, possibly being even older than our own star.

Now that it is passing out of the solar system we can look at all the data that NASA collected and make some fairly confident conclusions. There are a lot of sources of information, but Wikipedia actually has a pretty good summary and list of references. In the end, 3I/Atlas behaved mostly like a typical comet. It formed a tail heading away from the sun, brightened as it got close, then faded away as it moved away from the sun. Spectral analysis found that the comet was unusually rich in carbon dioxide (CO2), with small amounts of water ice, water vapor, carbon monoxide (CO), and carbonyl sulfide (OCS). It also had small amounts of cyanide and nickel gas, which is common in comets from our own solar system. In other words – it is a comet. It did originate from a part of the sky that we had previously calculated would have fewer such interstellar objects, which either makes it especially rare or means that our calculations are off.

Every time we encounter a new interstellar object we gather more data about such objects – how frequent are they, where do they come from, and what is their nature. Right now we have just three data points. After the first one, Oumuamua, we had not idea how common they were because we had just one data point. Now we have enough instruments surveying the sky that we are better able to detect such objects, which are very fleeting. The question was – was Oumuamua a one-off, and we just got lucky to detect something that happens very rarely, or are such objects common. We now have three data points and can conclude that they are fairly common, and we should detect one every few years or so, perhaps even more often if we start looking more.

Interstellar objects are a fairly new astronomical phenomenon, and what typically happens to new astronomical phenomena is that someone asks – could this be an alien artifact? So far the answer has been universally, no. The universe is a very big and complex place with lots of unusual phenomena. Historically speaking we have only just started to examine the cosmos, and are still encountering new phenomena on a regular basis. We have yet, however, to detect anything demonstrably, or even likely, alien. No one would be more excited than me if we discovered a genuine technosignature of an alien civilization. That is precisely why we have to be very careful before leaping to any such conclusions. But sure, ask the question, just don’t leap off the deep end.

What I mean by that is – do not make bad arguments to prop up an alien hypothesis, do not mystery-monger, do not truck in conspiracy theories, and do not draw undue attention to such speculation or present it as anything other than speculation. Every generation seems to have someone, sometimes with a scientific background, who does all of these things. The allure of the alien hypothesis is just too great. It is genuinely fascinating. It is the fast track to fame and attention. You can portray yourself as just being open-minded, brave enough to ask the tough questions, and criticize your colleagues for being closed-minded. Of course, like many things, this is a continuum. A little  is reasonable, more starts to get sketchy, and a lot makes you a crank.

An example of something which I consider to be in the sweet spot of good scientific exploration of the possibility of alien technosignatures is SETI. SETI essentially uses radioastronomy to survey for potential radio signals of alien origin. But they are not just doing this – they are also doing lots of ordinary good radio astronomy. But mixed in with their radio astronomy are methods to screen for signals that might be technosignatures. They are also extremely careful not to make any premature or overblown claims, and they are their own most dedicated skeptics.

At the other end of the spectrum, in my opinion, is Avi Loeb. He has seemed to make a career now out of mystery mongering anything unusual as a possible alien artifact. He claimed that all three interstellar objects might be alien craft. Why is he at the crank end of the spectrum? Because he elevated this possibility prematurely and with a series of really bad arguments, sometimes distorting the data or making bad calculations. He said that Oumuamua might be alien because it was coming close to the Earth, to observe it. He then argued that 3I/Atlas might be alien because it was not coming close to the Earth, to hide from us. He exaggerated its possible size, its apparent lack of a tail, its composition. He made a lot of the fact that the comet’s trajectory is close to the ecliptic, about 5 degrees off, committing a classic lottery fallacy argument. He calculated how likely this specific feature is, but only after knowing it, and did not adjust for all possible features that might be individually unlikely. He engaged in classic post-hoc reasoning. In the end, the predictions of NASA scientists all proved correct – 3I/Atlas is a comet, and displays all the features of a comet. Loeb attracted attention by saying 3I/Atlas might pivot toward the Earth once it emerges from behind the sun. When this prediction failed he did admit it was “most likely natural”, but is still emphasizing its apparent anomalies.

What he is doing is playing coy, which is a common strategy for those who are pushing fringe ideas but who are trying to seem reasonable. All along he said – the most likely explanation is that it is natural. But then follows up with – here are lots of (really bad) reasons why it is unusual and might be alien. This is a win-win for him – in the rare case that he turns out to be right, he is a genius and takes all the credit (keep in mind, if it were alien NASA would have found out all by themselves, with his prodding). If it turns out he is wrong, then he can claim he said all along it was likely to be natural. Either way he sucks up as much oxygen as possible from the media and distracts from the hard-working scientists at NASA doing good work. There is some great and interesting science here. The conclusion that this is almost certainly not an alien craft is a footnote at best, because there was never any good reason to hypothesize that it was.

Loeb is at it again (or still) with a recent post about a “mysterious” Mars cylinder (see the picture above the fold). This is also a common strategy of mystery mongers – comb through tons of data looking for anything unusual, then declare it a mystery. Again – looking for anomalies is a legitimate process of science. Blowing up apparent anomalies into a high-priority mystery is something that an attention-seeking crank would do. In this case others combed through NASA pictures from the Rover and then send it along to Loeb, so he is now a magnet for such things. And again – he admits this is most likely to be just a piece of debris from the Rover itself, or its landing, or whatever. There is now debris on Mars from all the spacecraft we have sent from Earth, so when we encounter a bit of what looks like ordinary debris, that is most likely what it is.

But Loeb is saying that NASA should turn the rover around and travel a few days to go back and take a closer look at this debris. NASA has not responded or commented to Loeb’s statement. This is actually a good operational definition of making too much of an apparent anomaly. Thinking that such anomalies, even when they are likely mundane, should take high priority and redirect our limited resources away from other scientific priorities, is worse than grabbing attention. It is trying to commandeer precious public resources to go on your own wild-goose chases, not because it is good science, but because it serves your own personal agenda.  NASA is perfectly capable of determining the proper priorities for their own rover. They don’t have to go chasing after every piece of space junk because Loeb is trying to grab attention and justify his own dubious professional existence.

The post What Happened to Comet 3I/Atlas first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

In the decades before the Wright brothers historic 1903 flight at Kitty Hawk there were many claims of powered heavier-than-air flying machines. There were also many false sightings of “airships”, amounting to a form of mass delusion. But the false claims and false sightings do not change the fact that the technology for powered flight was right on the cusp, and that the Wright brothers crossed that threshold in 1903, leading ultimately to the massive industry we have today. This is not surprising. There is often a sense, in the industry and spreading to the public, that the technological pieces are in place for a significant application breakthrough. Today this is more true than ever, with a vibrant industry of tech news, showcases, conferences, blogs, podcasts, etc. I cover plenty of tech new here. It’s interesting to try to glimpse what technology is right around the corner. Any technology that is closely watched and much anticipated is likely to generate lots of premature hype and false claims.

This is definitely true for battery technology. We are arguably in the middle of a massive effort to electrify as much of our industry as possible, especially transportation. Also maximizing intermittent renewable sources of energy would be greatly facilitated by advances in energy storage. Meanwhile electronic devices are becoming increasingly integrated into our daily lives. Advances in battery technology can have a dramatic impact on all these sectors, and is likely to be a critical technology for the next century. So it’s no surprise that there is a lot of hype surrounding battery tech, some of it legitimate, some of it fake, and some just premature. But this hype does not change the fact that battery technology is rapidly improving and the hype will become reality soon enough (just like the Wright flyer).

When it comes to EV batteries we all have a wish-list of features we would like to see. I now own two EVs, and they are the best cars I have ever owned. At least for my personal situation (I live in an exurb and own my own parking spots), EVs are great, and current battery technology is more than adequate for EVs. But sure, I live everyday with the reality of how advances in battery tech will make EVs even more convenient and useful. I have detailed the wish-list before, but here it is again: increased capacity, both in terms of volume but especially weight (specific energy), to decrease the weight while increasing the potential range of EVs, faster charging (with the holy grail being the ability to fully recharge an EV as fast as you can fill a car with gas), long charge-discharge cycle lifespan (longer than the lifespan of the car), useful in a wide range of temperatures, stability (does not spontaneously catch fire), and cheap, which is tied to being made from cheap and abundant elements. This last feature also means that the battery is not dependent on rare elements whose supply line is largely controlled by hostile or conflict-ridden countries.

Making a significant breakthrough in any one of these features is big news. This is why Donut Lab’s claim to have simultaneously improved all of these wish-list features at once was met with so much skepticism. (I will give a quick update on Donut Labs at the end of this post.) Now we have another bold claim, this one from a US company based in Dallas. Their claim focuses on just one feature of EV batteries, the recharge time, however they also claim reduced need for cobalt, which is nice. The company is OMI, who claims to have innovated a new iron-based cathode that allows an EV to recharge from empty to full in 3 minutes. That would be huge – 3 minutes is the holy grail, about as long as it takes to fill a tank of gas. Technically they claim a 20C recharge rate. The “C” is based on a convention with 1C meaning that a battery can fully charge in 1 hour. So a 20C battery, by definition, would recharge fully in 3 minutes. For reference, most fast charging EV batteries today are rated at 8-12C, or a 7.5 to 5 minute recharge time. This is already pretty good, and as you can see there is a diminishing return with increased C rating when translated into recharge time. Of note, however, these ratings are under ideal conditions. In the real world we are still looking at 10-12 minute recharge times for the fastest recharging batteries.

To me this is not a big deal at all. Even when I use a charger that requires 20 minutes to go from 20-80% charge, it’s rare I am doing that on the road (only during long trips), and it’s relatively easy to plan that around a pit stop anyway. Go to the restroom, get a snack, and by the time you get back to your car you are done or almost done. Any improvement from there is icing on the cake. Ten to twelve minutes would be fantastic. Three minutes is insane. Keep in mind, 99% of the time I am slow charging my EVs at home. But sure, that occasional time you are driving home late at night and you need a top off to make it home, and you have nothing to do but wait there while your car recharges, faster is definitely better.

So how reliable is this claim from OMI. It looks pretty credible. They are calling the technology LnFP (lithium nano-ferrophosphate). This is a variation on the established LMFP technology which uses manganese in the cathode. Doping the cathode with manganese allows for faster charging. OMI is not revealing the exact chemistry of their new cathode (industry secrets and all), but will only say that it is nano-structured, hence the “nano”. Nothing there that breaks the laws of physics, and this all seems reasonably incremental. But again, prematurely hyping plausible incremental advances, but ones that will give a company dominance in an industry, is not uncommon. Claim unlimited free energy and you are just an obvious crank or a fraudster. Claim a plausible incremental advance, and you generate excitement in the industry. But that still leaves the question – did they really achieve this, or are they hyping a lab phenomenon, or are they pulling a “fake it till you make it” maneuver to goose funding?

The broader context here is that OMI is not one of the major players in battery technology, investing billions in a global race to push the industry forward and grab market share. They are a small startup, although they have been providing components to large companies like Harley Davidson. Are we seeing the democratization of battery tech, with spunky small startup leveraging creativity and innovation to challenge the major players? Or is this mostly small startups trying to make a quick score by making bold claims and either attracting big funding or getting snapped up by one of the big boys? OMI claims their battery claims are validated, but I cannot find any independent third-part validation. They also claim they will go into production in 2027. That is the ultimate test – can they mass produce these batteries at a competitive price and they actually work as advertised in products?

Speaking of which, two months ago Donut Labs announced to the world a dream solid-state battery with all the wish-list features. Now they are claiming independent testing and validation, but again it is not quite worthy of the hype they are putting out. Finland’s state-owned VTT Technical Research Centre has tested some of its features. It tested the rapid recharge time revealing a 0-80% charge in 4.5 minutes, with a 5C rating. Testing has also demonstrated their solid state battery is not a supercapacitor, which was one of the theories. But that, so far, is it. The 400 Wh/kg specific energy has not been validated, and that is really the main feature. So far we have more of a glimpse than total verification. So I am still withholding ultimate judgement until all the evidence is in, but it still seems sketchy to me. I hope that everyone is wrong, and Donut Labs has really achieved what they claim. But that hope, I think, is the point.

The post Another Bold Battery Claim first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

This is a tiny ray of light in what has been a gloomy year for science-based federal health policy. Recently U.S. District Court Judge Brian Murphy in Boston ruled that the actions of RFK Jr. as HHS Secretary to fire the entire Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) did not follow procedure and is therefore not valid. Further, he concluded that the new ACIP, packed with anti-vaxxers, made capricious and arbitrary decisions that did not follow established science-based procedure. His ruling is a preliminary injunction that has delayed meetings of the ACIP and stays the revised vaccine schedule. The ruling is in a case brought by a coalition of medical professional societies, including the American Academy of Pediatrics. They are celebrating the ruling as “a momentous step toward restoring science-based vaccine policymaking.”

There are a few layers to this story. The first is RFK Jr. himself and what he has been doing as HHS secretary. I have not written much about him here, because posts about him and other Trump health appointees have dominated the SBM blog over the last year. This has been an “extinction level event” for rational federal health policy, and we have documented it and analyzed it every step of the way. David Gorski has done a great job specifically documenting what RFK Jr. has done to vaccines in the US in his series – “RFK Jr. is definitely coming for your vaccines”, in which he just published part 8. He did a great job not only documenting all of RFK Jr’s harmful actions but actually predicting them. Essentially, RFK is systematically using every lever at his disposal to dismantle the vaccine infrastructure in the US to reduce vaccines as much as possible. Given his actions he clearly straight-up lied to the confirmation committee when he said he was not anti-vaccine and would not take away American’s vaccines.

We, of course, recognized exactly what RFK Jr was doing during the hearings, because we have been following his nonsense for 30 years. He said, for example, “If we want uptake of vaccines, we need a trustworthy government,” Kennedy said. “That’s what I want to restore to the American people and the vaccine program. I want people to know that if the government says something, it’s true.” He then promised “gold standard science”. I would argue he has done the exact opposite. But what this statement is is classic denialism. Just claim you want to review the science, that everything is open to examination, and you just want the highest standards of science. These principles are great, but they can be used as a weapon, not just a tool. You can deny well-established scientific conclusions by arbitrarily claiming we need yet higher standards. Also, claiming you want to “restore” faith in the vaccine program assumes there is currently a lack of faith, which is rich coming from the person who has done the most to undermine that faith with pseudoscience and false claims. That is another denialist strategy – make a well-established science seem controversial, then argue that because it’s controversial we need to reexamine it and call it into question.

This point requires further discussion. It may seem ironic that at SBM we are constantly calling for higher standards of medical science, but now we are complaining about calling for higher standards of science. But again, this gets to using such calls as a weapon vs a tool. No conclusion in medical science is bullet-proof. All science is simply inference to the best current conclusion based on existing evidence. Medical science, because we are dealing with variable biological units (and not things like electrons), is especially complex. We are always making decisions with imperfect information, making our best extrapolation from what is known, and ultimately making a risk vs benefit decision. This requires constant review of the evidence by recognized experts to help establish and maintain a standard of care. But you can attack any medical practice as lacking sufficient evidence, if that is your agenda. This is why expert reviews need to be as free from bias as possible, and as transparent as possible. And the reviews need reviews. It’s a constant process.

The problem with what RFK Jr is doing is not that he is reviewing the science, it’s that he is putting a massive anti-scientific, conspiracy-addled, and biased thumb on the scale. He arbitrarily fired the entire ACIP, then packed it with known anti-vaxxers. Packing a review panel is one way to get the outcome you want.

David lays out what RFK Jr has already done and will likely do going forward to undermine vaccines. The most recent outrage – his MAHA institute is sponsoring a MEVI conference, which stands for Massive Epidemic of Vaccine Injury. Gee – I wonder what they will conclude. He’s not even pretending anymore.

The other big layer to this story, however, is how effective will a court injunction be in stopping the RFK Jr anti-vaccine wrecking ball? The court is correct – we have a process for a reason, to ensure that judgements about what the evidence say are objective and transparent. Bypassing that process and arbitrarily replacing it with one that is blatantly agenda-driven is not a valid process. But this gets into a tricky area – the “checks and balances” of the three equal branches of our federal government. How much oversight and veto power does and should the judicial branch have against overreach by the executive branch? Legal scholars can debate this – again I just hope we have an objective and transparent process to make such decisions.

But executives can put their fat thumb on the scale of this process too – by packing the federal courts with ideologues that will follow their wishes rather than following the law. They can also do it by judge-shopping, keep raising cases until you get a friendly judge. Our rights and freedoms should not so heavily depend on “federal judge roulette”. It should also not depend so much on the randomness of which executive gets to appoint the most Supreme Court judges. If the system gets too biased in one direction, then the public starts to lose confidence in the objectivity of the court, and the overall problem deepens. We seem to be digging ourselves deeper and deeper into a hole of affective polarization, lack of faith in the system, and justifying extremism.

What saves us from bias, arbitrary decisions, extremism, and corruption are institutions that have a process to maximize transparency, average out and minimize bias and conflicts of interest, and elevate genuine expertise. This is partly built on codified procedure, but also on democratic and professional culture and standards. RFK Jr is a blatant example of what happens when you ignore that culture of professionalism and let lose an ideologue to “go wild”.

The post Federal Judge Partly Blocks RFK Jr’s Anti-Vaccine Wrecking Ball first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

How common is life in the universe? This is one of the greatest scientific questions, with incredible implications, but we lack sufficient information to answer it. The main problem is the “N of 1” problem – we only have one example of life in all the universe. So we are left to speculate, which is still very useful when based on solid scientific evidence and reasoning. It helps guide our search for signs of life that arose independently from life on Earth.

One important question, therefore, is where is it possible for life to exist? We know life can arise on a rocky planet with a nitrogen and CO2 atmosphere in a temperature range that allows liquid water on the surface. We also know that such life may create and sustain large amounts of oxygen in the atmosphere. It therefore makes sense to focus our search on similar planets. But life does not have to be restricted to Earth-like life. Scientists, therefore, try to imagine what other conditions might also support some kind of life. It is possible, for example, that life arose in the vast oceans under the ice of moons like Europa or Enceladus. Such life would be very different than most life on Earth. It would be dependent on chemical processes for energy (chemosynthetic), rather than sunlight.

Knowing how many different kinds of places life could possibly exist affects our estimate of the number of locations in our galaxy that might harbor life. The current estimates for how many Earth-like exoplanets there are in the Milky Way galaxy ranges from 300 million to 40 billion, depending on various assumptions and how tightly you define “Earth-like”. There are 100-400 billion stars in the galaxy, but about a third of those stars are in multi-star systems, so that means there are tens to up to 100 billion distinct stellar systems in the Milky Way.  One estimate from observed multi-star systems is that about 89% of them could allow for a stable orbit of a rocky planet in the habitable zone.

But perhaps we should not limit the calculations of how many worlds in the galaxy may support life to Earth-like planets. I am not just talking about life in oceans under icy moons. Astronomers have also been considering the possibility of life on moons that orbit free floating gas giant planets. A free floating planet (FFP), also called a nomadic planet or rogue planet, does not orbit a star at all. At some point, likely early in the life of its parent star, it was flung out of its system and now wanders freely between the stars. Astronomers estimate there may be hundreds of billions of such planets in the Milky Way. But this means the planet is dark, without any sunlight to keep it warm or fuel life. What about the moons of an FFP, however?

It is possible that an FFP can retain some of its moons even once ejected from its system – they would not necessarily be stripped of their moons in the process. However, the orbits of those moons would likely become more eccentric. Astronomers imagine a large moon orbiting an FFP gas giant in an elliptical orbit. Tidal forces would constantly stretch and pull the moon, causing its interior to heat up. These forces can be immense. Io, a large moon of Jupiter, is close enough to Jupiter that the tidal forces on it heat it up so that it is constantly volcanic and molten, turning itself inside out through such activity. So there would be a tidal Goldilocks zone around such gas giants as well, heating them up enough to support life but not become a volcanic hellscape.

Such moons could therefore be like Europa, with an icy shell but enough internal heat from tidal forces to keep a liquid ocean. But astronomers also want to know if such a moon could have liquid water on its surface. This would require a thick enough atmosphere to keep the surface water from evaporating away into space. It would also require an atmosphere capable of trapping enough heat to keep the surface warm (in this case the heat would be coming from the moon itself through tidal forces, and not from starlight, but it doesn’t matter). Astronomers have previously considered CO2 as a heat trapping gas, and this would work. However, because the upper atmosphere faces the cold dark of space, without a star to warm it up, the CO2 would slowly condense out of the atmosphere. Astronomers estimate such a moon could maintain surface water for about 1.3 billion years before the system collapses. This is a long time, long enough for life to arise, but not as long as it took life on Earth to get to its current state of complexity.

In a recent paper astronomers propose another situation that might work better – a mostly hydrogen atmosphere. An H2 dominated atmosphere would also trap sufficient heat (if it were thick enough) to maintain liquid water on the surface, just from internal heat through tidal forces. Further, such an atmosphere would be more stable than a CO2 atmosphere, lasting up to 4.3 billion years – long enough for complex life to evolve. Such life would likely be very different than Earth life, lacking sunlight and therefore photosynthesis, but it could exist.

If this analysis pans out, this could mean that potential locations for life in our galaxy is many times current estimates that do not include such moons. But again – until we actually find such life, we can only speculate about possibilities. Obviously we have no way of going to such locations (at least, not anytime soon, or likely for a very long time), but we can look for biosignatures, such as the presence of large amounts of oxygen (or any molecule that is not stable and would have to be constantly replenished by living processes) in the atmosphere.

And of course the ultimate question – could such complex life become technological, in which case we might also look for technosignatures. What would an intelligent technologically advanced species from a hydrogen exomoon around a rogue planet be like? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to find out one day.

The post Life on Exomoons first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

Creationism, in all its various manifestations, is sophisticated pseudoscience. This makes it a great teaching tool to demonstrate the difference between legitimate science and science denial dressing up as a cheap imitation of science. Creationist arguments are a great example of motivated reasoning, providing copious examples of all the ways logic and argumentation can go awry. It has also been interesting to see creationist arguments (at the leading edge) “adapt” and “evolve” into more complex forms, while maintaining their core feature of denying evolution at all costs.

I am going to focus in this article on young Earth creationists, specifically Answers in Genesis, and something that is a persistent element of their position. Essentially they do not understand the concept of nested hierarchies. I have a strong sense that this is because they are highly motivated not to understand it, because if they did the entire structure of their YEC arguments would collapse.

This AiG article is a great example – Speciation is Not Evolution. The article is more than a bit galling, given that the author seeks to lecture scientists about the use of precise definitions. It begins by patronizingly explaining the humor in the famous “Who’s on First” skit (gee, thanks for that), then accuses scientists of not being precise with their definitions. This is, of course, the opposite of the truth. Good science endeavors to be maximally precise in terminology (hence the jargon of science), and it is creationists who habitually use vague and shifting definitions – such as their abuse of the word “information” and for that matter “evolution”.

We see this right in the title of the paper – speciation is not evolution – well, speciation is part of evolution. No one claims that by itself it encompasses evolution, but it’s a pretty critical part. They play this game frequently, by claiming, for example, that natural selection does not increase “information”. Correct, it non-randomly selects information. But mutations, duplications, and recombinations demonstrably increase information. They then argue that mutations only “degrade” information, and duplications only copy what is already there. Mutations change information in ways that can be neutral, positive, or negative, as judged by the context of the individual organism. Duplications absolutely increase the amount of information (again, what definition of information are they even using), allowing for one copy to maintain its original function while the new copy can mutate into new functions.

But let’s get to the core argument of this article, that speciation can occur within “kinds” but cannot turn one kind into another. In other words, dogs can evolve into new species of dogs, but a dog can never evolve into a cat. “Evolutionists”, they argue, don’t understand this difference, and so confuse speciation within a kind to “macroevolution” from one kind to another. Meanwhile, they do not have an operational precise definition of what a “kind” is. The word comes from the Bible (God created creatures each according to their own kind) and is not a scientific concept. The author states that a kind roughly correlates to a family level taxonomically. But that doesn’t help. A taxonomical “family” is also not a precise thing. It is simply a categorization convention, and varies tremendously across the tree of life. The same is true of macroevolution – this is not a scientific concept and has no operational definition.

The problem with both of these concepts – kind and macroevolution – is that they suffer from a fatal demarcation problem. There are lots of demarcation problems in science, anytime we are trying to categorize a messy continuum of nature. What’s a planet, or species, or continent? The difference is, the YEC argument is contingent on there being a sharp demarcation – evolution can proceed to this amount, but no further. Evolution can account for this degree of change, but no further. The problem is, they never state any reason, based on any valid principles, as to why. They simply assert that kinds are inviolate.

But at the core of their claims is a complete misunderstanding of what evolutionary science actually claims. Ironically, when they say that dogs can only evolve into more dogs, and never into cats – they are correct. Evolutionary scientists agree with this statement, especially if you take a cladistic approach to taxonomy. By definition a clade is one species and all of its descendants. This is why it is cladistically correct to say that people are fish. Once the eukaryotic clade evolved, everything that descends from it are still eukaryotes. So humans are eukaryotes, and animals, vertebrates, fish, lobe-finned fish, reptiles, mammals, and primates. It is correct, for example, to say that all descendants of fish are still fish, but you have to count humans as fish. What you cannot ever do is go back up the cladistic tree. You cannot undo evolution. You also cannot make a lateral move to another unrelated clade. So an animal cannot evolve into a plant.

The YEC misunderstanding of this concept renders all of their arguments as to why evolutionary scientists are wrong into strawman arguments. No one ever said a dog can evolve into a cat – in fact scientists say this is impossible. It is not part of evolutionary thinking.

What creationist do is grossly underestimate how much change can occur within a clade, because they are stuck on the concept of “kinds”. Functionally what is a kind? It’s one of those things that you vaguely sense. You know it when you see it. Everyone knows what dinosaurs look like – they have a dinosaurish vibe. This is why they falsely argue that birds could not have evolved from dinosaurs. Actually, it is more correct to simply say that birds are dinosaurs – they are a subclade within the dinosaur clade. Birds are also reptiles, because dinosaurs are a subclade within reptiles, which are a subclade within fish, etc. It’s nested hierarchies all the way down. But birds look like a different kind than dinosaurs, so this violates their vague sense of what a kind is. They then mock this idea by analogizing it to a dog evolving into a cat – this this is a false analogy. Dogs and cats are different subclades of mammals, and you cannot evolve from one clade into another, only into subclades within your existing clade.

Stephen J. Gould also discussed this idea and zoomed in on an important concept that is highly misunderstood. Over evolutionary time we expect that disparity (not diversity, the amount of differences, but disparity, the degree of difference) decreases. This seems counterintuitive, but it makes sense once you fully internalize the concept of nested hierarchies. Multicellular life achieved maximal morphological disparity soon after the Cambrian explosion, and from that point forward we only see variations of the various body plan themes. Over evolutionary time the nested hierarchy structure of the tree of life means that we see variations on progressively constrained themes. Evolution is constrained by its history, so the more evolutionary history a lineage has, the more constrained its future evolution. If we look at the entire history of evolution, we see this increasing constraint play out as decreasing disparity. At most disparity can stay the same, but extinction is like a ratchet slowly decreasing disparity.

To take an extreme example used by Gould to illustrate this, imagine a mass extinction where the only surviving land vertebrates are dogs. Eventually those dogs will adapt and fill all the empty niches – you will have herbivore dogs, grazing dogs, dogs living in trees, predator dogs, and more. But they will all be variations on dogs. A dog will not evolve into a giraffe, but it may evolve into a giraffe-like dog, while still retaining dog features. This is also why using modern extant examples (a dog evolving into a cat) also makes no sense. The dog clade is evolutionarily constrained to forever be dogs, even though that can include a lot of diversity. But if you go back in time a few hundred million years, you can have a mammal that is less evolutionarily constrained that evolved into both cats and dogs.

We can also ask the question – what does the evidence show? Above is the picture that AiG uses to illustrate its speciation within clades. The depiction of each clade is conceptually not bad (I don’t think it was meant to be literally accurate), but it artificially stops at an arbitrary line of “kinds”. Does the evidence support this view? What would we expect to see if each kind were created unto itself and separate from all other kinds? What would we expect to see if these nested hierarchies go all the way back to the beginning of life? You can fill a book reviewing the actual evidence, but let me give a quick summary.

If the YEC schematic is correct, then we would expect to see discrete clades that can be cleanly separated – morphologically, genetically, physiologically and biochemically. If the evolution schematic is correct then we would not expect any clean separation, but a continuum along all these features leading back as far as the evidence goes. The bottom line is that the evidence is a home run for the evolutionary prediction. Creationists deal with this devastating fact in a couple of ways. First, they often simply deny the evidence, saying things like “there are no transitional fossils”. They support this claim by mischaracterizing the evidence, ignoring evidence, and also by playing loose with the definition of “transitional”.

They also make the claim that any similarities between kinds is due to each kind having the same creator. Why would the creator reinvent the wheel with each kind, of course he just used the same solutions over and over again. But this argument only goes so far. There are numerous connections between clades that go far beyond utility, such as viral inclusions. The genetic material from a virus can get stuck in the genome of a creature, and then persist down throughout its clade. These are non-functional bits of viral residue in the genome, and they provide a map of nested hierarchies which obey clades, but violate any notion of kinds.

We also can look at the fossil record temporally. In the YEC model, we should see all clades appearing at the same time (creation), then going through a simultaneous bottleneck (the flood) followed by speciation into our current extant species. That is not what we see – not even close. Some will say – what about the Cambrian, that is the sudden appearance of all kinds. Um, no. There are no birds, dogs, triceratops, horses, or humans in the Cambrian. All the family-levelish kinds they say exist were not in the Cambrian fauna. The Cambrian explosion resulted mainly in the multicellular phyla (basic body plans), including some that are now extinct. If they claimed that kinds were phyla and that they were created 500 million years ago, they would have a stronger case. But that is not what they say. Over time we then see increasing diversity within clades, with new subclades evolving and appearing over evolutionary time. We basically see exactly what we would predict if all life has a common ancestor, and not what we would expect to see if life were divided into family level kinds created all at the same time.

Creationists cannot engage with what evolutionary scientists actually claim, so they have to invent ridiculous straw men to attack. They use loose and shifting definitions, and then have the gall to falsely accuse scientists of doing that. They can’t explain the evidence, so that have to ignore and distort it beyond all recognition.

And to clarify my position, in case you are new to this blog, I am not against belief in God and essentially don’t care what anyone believes when it comes to metaphysical questions. But science follows methodological naturalism, and if you follow the methods of science there is only one logical, evidence-based, and scientific answer to the question of the origin of species. The evidence overwhelmingly shows that all life is descended from a common ancestor in a nested hierarchy of relationships.

The post Creationists Don’t Understand Nested Hierarchies first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

Researchers have recently published a discovery that could lead to more efficient photosynthesis in many crops. It’s hard to overstate how impactful this would be, as this could significantly increase crop yields while decreasing inputs. The growing human population makes such advances critical. Even without that factor, increasing yields decreases the land intensiveness of agriculture, which has a dramatic impact on our environment and sustainability. Improved photosynthesis would be a win across the board.

Before we get into the study there are a couple of points I want to explore. When I first learned of the various research efforts to improve photosynthesis my first reaction was – why hasn’t evolution already optimized something that is so critical to all life. The first photosynthetic organisms evolved at least 3.4 billion years ago. That’s a lot of time for evolutionary tweaking. So why is efficiency still an issue? There are a couple answers, but the primary one appears to be the constraints of evolutionary history. What this means is that evolution can only work with what it has, and it cannot undo its history. Once development leads down a certain path, evolution can make variations on the path but it cannot go back in time and take a completely different path. All vertebrates are variations on a basic body plan, for example.

So what are the evolutionary constraints of photosynthesis? Photosynthesis involves using the energy from sunlight to combine carbon dioxide (CO2) with water (H2)) to make glucose and oxygen. Critical to this reaction is an enzyme, ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase (RubisCO), which fixes the carbon from CO2 into organic compounds. This enzyme, RubisCO, is responsible for over 90% of all carbon in living things. It is the most common enzyme in the world and is a cornerstone of living ecosystems, which mostly depend on energy from the sun.

RubisCO, however, is not very efficient. It does not catalyze the reaction very quickly or specifically. The most likely reason for this inefficiency is that RubisCO evolved on the ancient Earth, before the “great oxidation event”. This means it evolved when the atmosphere had lots of CO2 but no or little oxygen, therefore it did not have to distinguish between the two. This means there was no selective pressure for an enzyme that would catalyze a reaction with CO2 but not O2. RubisCO catalyzes both. By the time oxygen started to build up in the atmosphere, RubisCO was well established as the enzyme of photosynthesis. There is also a tradeoff between efficiency and specificity, meaning that the more specific RubisCO is for CO2 over O2, the slower the reaction, and the faster the reaction, the lower the specificity (the more “mistakes” the enzyme makes by catalyzing a side reaction with O2).

To be clear, scientists often use metaphors when discussing this situation. RubisCO does not really make “mistakes”, it just does what it does. And the reaction with O2 is only a “side” reaction from the perspective of what’s best for the organism and from evolutionary selective pressures (but that’s the context that matters). So evolution has tweaked RubisCO over billions of years to have the optimal balance between efficiency and specificity. It should also be noted that this side reaction with O2 is not just wasteful, it creates toxic compounds that have to be cleared. It is estimated that plants waste 30% of the energy captured from sunlight creating and then dealing with these O2 side reactions. But evolution was effectively “trapped” in this tradeoff. Organisms had been using RubisCO  for over a billion years prior to the great oxidation event and were too dependent on it to evolve a completely new method of photosynthesis.

How do we break out of this trap? For this we need another concept – stoichiometry. You remember the bunsen burners from high school science class. You have to adjust the air intake to get the flame to go from a sputtering yellow flame to a bright blue steady flame. You need just the right ratio of gas to air to optimize the efficiency of the reaction. The situation with RubisCO is similar, although simpler. We need to maximize the concentration of CO2 and minimize the concentration of O2 around the RubisCO, in order to simultaneously improve the efficiency and specificity of the reaction. These are called carbon concentrating mechanisms, or CCMs. This idea may be simple, but evolutionarily it is very difficult (judging by how often such CO2 concentrating mechanisms have evolved in nature).

Cyanobacteria and eukaryotic algae have evolved CCMs. Algae specifically evolved structures called pyrenoids which concentrate RubisCO in parts of the chloroplasts where CO2 can also be concentrated. Researchers have been trying to understand the genetics and physiology of these CCMs to see if they can be ported to land plants, specifically crops. Unfortunately, these CCM systems are complex, involving many genes working together. Plus the evolutionary distance between algae and land plants makes adapting these systems difficult.

This brings us to the latest study – which looks at the CCM in a specific type of land plant. About 8-15% of land plants have also evolved some sort of CCM, so most still use what is called the traditional C3 version of RubisCO. Perhaps the CCM in one of these branches of land plants could more easily be adopted in crops. Some plants use what it called C4, which uses a biochemical pump to move CO2 into sheath cells. This evolved only about 20-30 million years ago, and is found in maize, sorghum, sugarcane, and some tropical grasses. Another mechanism is CAM Plants (Crassulacean Acid Metabolism), which take up CO2 at night and store it as acid, then use it during the day to increase CO2 during photosynthesis.  Then there is the hornworts which concentrate RubisCO using organelles similar to algae. The recent study looks at this third mechanism.

Here’s the good news – the researchers found that hornworts (which are small ground plants) use a very simple mechanism. There is an extra tail on the C terminus of one of the subunits of RubisCO. The researchers named this region RbcS-STAR, or the STAR region of the RubisCO. This extra tail acts like velcro, causing RubisCO to stick together and clump, which is good if you want to concentrate CO2 and RubisCO in the same part of the cell. They added the STAR piece to a relative of hornwort, and it worked. They added it to Arabidopsis, an unrelated plant often used in research, and this also caused the RubisCO to clump. So they demonstrated that STAR works, even in unrelated species. This research suggests that RbcS-STAR will likely work in a diverse range of plants.

However – the research is not done yet. Essentially they have only one half of the job done. Now they need to find a way to bring high concentrations of CO2 to the clumps of RubisCO. Perhaps they can borrow the biochemical pumps from C4 plants. There is already extensive research into porting C4 photosynthesis into C3 crops, like wheat and rice. These efforts have proved challenging, because they involve complex leaf restructuring (such as increasing the density of veins). It is possible that this discovery of RbcS-STAR could offer a simpler solution to making C4 work in these plants.

Making C4 wheat or rice could increase their yield by up to 50%. That would be transformative to agriculture, and is worth the extensive research into cracking this complex problem. While the current discovery is just one possible piece to the puzzle, it is very encouraging and hopefully moves us significantly closer to a solution.

The post Improved Photosynthesis first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

If we are going to have an enduring presence on either the Moon or Mars, or anyplace off of Earth, we will need to grow food there. It is simply too expensive, inconvenient, and fragile to be dependent on food entirely from Earth. In fact, any off-Earth habitat will need to be able to recycle most if not all of its resources. You basically need a reliable source of energy, sufficient food, water, and oxygen (consumables) to sustain all inhabitants, and the ability to endlessly recycle that food, water, and oxygen.

The ISS has achieved 98% recycling of water, which is what NASA claims is the threshold for sustainability of long space missions. The ISS also recycles about 40% of its oxygen. However, the ISS grows none of its food. It is all delivered from Earth, with a 6 month supply aboard the ISS. There are experiments to grow plants on the ISS, and these have been successful, but this is not a significant source of nutrition for the astronauts.

Doing the same on the Moon is not practical for long missions, although we will certainly be doing this for a time. But the goal, if we are to have a lunar base as NASA hopes (NASA plans a lunar base at the Moon’s south pole by 2030) is to grow food on the Moon (and eventually on Mars). On the ISS the big limiting factor is microgravity. The Moon has lower gravity than Earth, but it has some gravity and so that will likely not be a major problem, especially since we can grow plants on the ISS. We can also grow plants hydroponically pretty much anywhere, and I suspect this will happen on any lunar base. But a fully hydroponic system has its limits as well.

Hydroponics on the Moon would be challenging for several reasons. First, it is energy intensive, and energy may be a premium on a lunar base, especially early on. Second, it requires a precise balance of nutrients in the water, and those nutrients would have to be sourced from Earth. So it doesn’t really solve the problem of dependence on Earth. And third, hydroponics requires a lot of equipment which would have to be shipped from Earth. We could theoretically leach nutrients from lunar regolith, and this might help a bit, but is also energy intensive and would not be a source of nitrogen.

Therefore – NASA and others are looking into the possibility of growing plants in lunar regolith. This could have multiple advantages. It requires much less equipment, energy, and water than hydroponics. Many of the nutrients would come from the regolith itself. This would reduce dependence on supplies from Earth. A soil-based system can also more easily recycle nutrients from food waste and human waste. Likely, a lunar base would have a hybrid hydroponic and soil-based system. As a side benefit, if such a base grew enough food to feed its human inhabitants, this would also recycle CO2 and produce more than enough oxygen for them to breath. In fact, they would have to figure out something to do with the extra oxygen to keep it from building up (likely not a problem – oxygen has many uses).

The major hurdle to growing food in lunar regolith is that – well, you can’t. Plants do not grow well in lunar regolith. It lacks nitrogen and other nutrients, it lacks organic matter, and it contains toxic compounds. Experimentally, plants will not grow sufficiently in simulated lunar regolith. But, we can treat the regolith to turn it into soil that can grow plants, and that is the focus of the current study mentioned in the headline. Scientists have used simulated regolith, modified by adding organic matter (vermicompost) created by red wiggler earthworms composting organic waste, and were able to grow chickpeas in the resulting soil. They tried various mixtures, and found that 75% regolith to 25% soil was the limit – more than 75% regolith and the plants would not survive. They also coated the chickpeas with arbuscular mycorrhizae before planting. The fungus is symbiotic, increasing the uptake of some nutrients while decreasing the uptake of some toxins like heavy metals.

The experiment was considered a success – the chickpea plants grew, survived, and produced chickpeas. However, they have not yet tested the chickpeas to see if they are safe and edible. They need to be tested for any toxic compounds. This is also not the first such study, there have been dozens of others. They generally show that crops will grow in modified simulated Martian and Lunar regolith. But questions remain about how good the simulated regoliths are.

There has also been one study using actual unmodified lunar regolith (brought back by the Apollo missions). In this study the plants grew, but showed signs of severe stress and were morphologically altered. That they grew at all, however, is amazing and encouraging.

What does all this mean for the future of lunar and Martian bases? They will very likely include some growing of food in modified regolith. The implication of the research is that we can likely develop a self-sustaining system in which plants are grown in modified soil using mostly native regolith. These plants produce food and oxygen while using CO2. The soil can then be fertilized using compost from any organic waste generated by the base, including humanure. You can even recycle urine in order to source nitrogen. In short, we can envision a system in which everything is recycled to locally produce food and air. We can also recycle 98% of the water in the system, perhaps eventually even more. You just need to kickstart the system with initial resources, and maybe need to top them off from time to time, but otherwise the system is self-sustaining.

It is also likely that the more the lunar or Martian regolith is used to grow food, the more it will look like Earth soil. The percentage of organic matter will increase, it will develop an ecosystem of microorganisms, and any toxins will be leached out over time. This high quality soil can then be used to expand the farm, and generate more modified soil from regolith.

It is also likely that such a lunar farm would exist underground, probably within a lava tube. This means that all the light with be artificial, but that’s not a big problem – we can do grow lights. Having a farm under a dome on the surface is likely not worth it. This would provide free sunlight, but only half the time, and not in a typical circadian cycle, but roughly 14 days of sunlight followed by 14 days of darkness. It would also be susceptible to radiation and micrometeors. Better to be in the safety of a lava tube, deep under ground, and just use grow lights.

Finally, one factor I have not mentioned yet is the potential to alter the plants themselves to adapt them to growing on the Moon, or on Mars or on a space station. Through some combination of cultivation and genetic engineering, we may be able to adapt crops to the lower gravity and the modified lunar soil. This could optimize productivity, safety, and nutrition.

While there is a lot of work to be done, the research so far shows that farming the Moon or Mars is feasible, which is good if we plan to have long term bases on either.

The post Scientists Grow Chickpeas In Lunar(ish) Soil first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

A recent study shows pretty clearly that highschoolers benefit from a little extra sleep. We will get to the study in a bit, but first I want to note that this information is not new. Teenagers tend to stay up late, and yet we make them get up super early to be at class, often by 7:00 AM. This is not good for their health or their learning. So why do we do it?

The primary reason is logistical, which is tied to cost. School systems have tiered start times for elementary, middle school, and high school because this allows them to use the same fleet of buses and drivers for all three. Starting high school later, at the same time as middle school, would mean increasing the size of the fleet. There are other stated reasons, but honestly I think this is the real reason and everything else is a backend justification. The other reasons are more tradeoffs, that benefit some people but not others. For example, a parent with a long commute could drop off their highschooler on the way to work. There is more time for after school clubs, sports, and jobs. While some older teens may get home early to watch their younger siblings until their parents get home.

This all points to a main reason our civilization is frustratingly sub-optimal (to be polite). The default is to follow the pathway of least resistance  – everyone just does what’s best for themselves, with people in power doing their best to solidify more power, with vested interests putting the most consistent effort into making the system work for their narrow interest. What is often lacking is any kind of systemic planning, and when that does occur (even with the best intentions) the law of unintended consequences often results in a net wash or even detriment. The world is complex, and we are just not very good at managing that level of complexity. What we need are institutions that can accumulate evidence-based institutional knowledge to incrementally make things work better. But that’s a lot of work, and it’s too easy for vested interests to sabotage such efforts.

I’m not trying to be nihilistic – nihilism is part of the problem, and is often used as a weapon by those vested interests to short circuit attempts to make things work better for everyone.  But we have to understand the nature and scope of the problem, and we need the energy and dedication to sustain efforts to make things work better. Such efforts can work, and historically they have made things better. But it’s a constant struggle.

OK, back to the study. In this study they gave students the option to start class up to an hour later. For example, school would officially start at 8:30, but also offered an optional module at 7:30 for those who wanted to come early and end early. The found:

“Under the flexible model, 95% of students used the later-start option. The median SST was delayed by 38 minutes (n = 711, β = .57, 95% confidence interval [.53, .62], p < .001, R2β = .52), with corresponding significant delays in wake times and increased sleep duration on school days. Among the paired subsample, SST delay was significantly associated with increased school day sleep duration (n = 205, β = .51 [.05, .94], p = .03, R2β = .02). No worsening was observed. Improvements included reduced problems falling asleep, fewer students with clinically low health-related quality of life, and higher scores in mathematics and English.”

Now that I am retired I have personally experienced (yes, this is just anecdotal) the benefits of sleeping in longer. I no longer even set an alarm – I wake up when I feel like it. I am still working basically full time doing all my science communication activities, but mostly on my own schedule. My sleep quality and daytime alertness have significantly improved. I highly recommend it. But more importantly – the evidence clearly shows that this is generally true – being able to sleep in longer results in better sleep and performance.

So it seems like a no-brainer – why can’t we do this? I think the key here is flexibility, which can be paired with increased flexibility at work, especially for parents. Flexible work start times and the ability to work from home, even if only 1-2 days a week, results in a huge improvement in life satisfaction. Then families will have the ability to make their schedules work. Let’s prioritize sleep, health, and educational effectiveness first, and make the system work for these goals. It makes no sense for a school system to sacrifice the well-being and education of their own students in order to meet their own logistical needs.

The obvious response to this question is – well, it’s all about money. We have to be realistic. School systems operate with limited budgets and have to make the most with the resources they have. If they have to maintain a larger bus fleet, where will that money come from? I get it. This is reality. My question is – who made this decision? Did we as a society, or even just the affected parents, make this decision collectively with adequate information to understand the implications of their decision? We may just have to accept the fact that running an effective school system is more expensive than we might want it to be, and cutting costs in this way is simply not an acceptable option.

If we prioritize the health and education of students, I think we will find there are other elements of the system that can accommodate. This is where municipal planning becomes even more integrated. Investing in public transportation and subsidizing it for students, for example, will give students more options and reduce the strain on a dedicated school bussing system. Facilitating carpooling among students is another option. More parental flexibility helps. Make schools more local and walkable/bikeable, and organize safe group walks to and from school. Optimize and disperse drop-off areas to limit bottle necks and reduce drop-off congestion.

This requires thoughtful planning, but mostly an unwillingness to simply sacrifice students to simplify logistics and reduce costs.

The post Flexible School Start Time first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

The news is abuzz with talk of a potential universal respiratory vaccine. It’s definitely interesting research, but may not be what you think. In this case, the reporting has been quite good on the whole, but the headlines can be misleading if you are not deeply steeped in the complexities of mammalian immunity. Let me start with the biggest caveat – this is a mouse study. This is therefore encouraging pre-clinical research, but we are still years away from translating this into an actual vaccine. Also, most interventions that are encouraging at the animal stage don’t make it through human testing. So don’t expect any revolution based on this treatment anytime soon. Having said that – there is great potential here.

To understand how this new approach works, let’s review some basics of immunity. (Note – the immune system is incredibly complex, and I can only give a very superficial summary here, but enough to understand what’s going on.) Mammalian immune systems have two basic components, innate immunity and adaptive immunity. The adaptive immune system is probably what most people think about when they think about the immune system and vaccines. Adaptive immunity targets and recognizes specific antigens (such as proteins) on pathogens like viruses, bacteria, or fungi. Antibodies attach to these antigens, flagging them to be targeted by immune cells like macrophages which then eat them. The macrophages in turn display the antibody-flagged antigens on their surface, triggering a greater and more specific reaction to those specific antigens. Adaptive immunity is considered slow (it takes days to ramp up), specific (it targets specific antigens on specific pathogens) and durable (it has memory, and will react more quickly and robustly to the same pathogen in the future).

By contrast, the innate immune system is fast, non-specific, and short-lived with no memory. The innate immune system consists of physical barriers, like skin and mucosa, and immune cells that target pathogens based on broad patterns that are not learned but are innate (hence the name). There are Toll-like receptors (TLRs – the name Toll comes from the German for “fantastic”, allegedly said by a researcher upon discovery). The Toll gene was first discovered in fruit flies and then similar genes were later discovered in mammals, hence “Toll-like”. TLRs detect pathogen-associated molecular patterns (PAMPs), which are highly conserved features of types of pathogens. In other words –  a TLR might recognize a snippet of RNA as a pattern typical of RNA viruses, or proteins that tend to occur on pathogenic bacteria. “That looks like an RNA virus, so let’s attack it.”

While these are distinct and complementary parts of the immune system, they are also highly tied together. Components of the innate immune system trigger the adaptive immune system, which in turn stimulates innate immunity. In fact, many traditional vaccines contain adjuvants which stimulate innate immunity in order to boost adaptive immunity.

The new vaccine (technical name – GLA-3M-052-LS+OVA), which is a nasal spray given in three doses to the mice being studied, stimulated innate immunity, not adaptive immunity. Normally, after exposure to a pathogen or even allergen, innate immunity will be heightened for a few days, then return to normal. The nasal vaccine extends this heightened innate immunity in the lungs and respiratory system for three months. It does this by containing synthetic molecules that bind to TLRs, tricking them into responding as if a pathogen is present. The vaccine also contains a protein called ovalbumin, which stimulated T-cells of the adaptive immune system, keeping them resident in the tissue. These T-cells help maintain the heightened state of activity of the innate immune system. According to the authors: “Protection was mediated by persistent ovalbumin-specific CD4+ and CD8+ memory T cells that imprinted alveolar macrophages (AMs), enhancing antigen presentation and antiviral immunity.”

The trick of stimulating innate immunity was partly borrowed from the tuberculosis BCG vaccine, which also works by both triggering adaptive immunity but also stimulating the innate immune system. Researchers studies how the BCG vaccine accomplished this and applied that knowledge to this new vaccine.

In the study the researchers compared mice treated with three doses of the nasal vaccine to untreated mice and found that the treated mice were protected for at least three months from “SARS-CoV-2 and Staphylococcus aureus. In addition, the vaccine protected mice from other viruses (SARS-CoV-2, SARS, SCH014 coronavirus), bacteria (Acinetobacter baumannii), and allergens.”

In the best-case-scenario where this vaccine technology is safe and effective in people, what can we expect? Well, I don’t think this would replace any traditional vaccines based on adaptive immunity. Like the two halves of the immune system itself, it will likely be complementary to traditional vaccines. Traditional vaccines can provide years and sometimes decades of specific protection from common pathogens, and there is no substitute for that. Also, this vaccine works on respiratory infections only, although it may be possible to adapt this approach to other types of infection.

What an innate immunity-based vaccine provides is a good first line of defense against an outbreak, epidemic, or seasonal infection. This would require many millions of doses (or even billions, in the context of a pandemic) being available at short notice to provide several months of resistance to an entire population at the beginning of an outbreak or a seasonal infection (like the flu). It remains to be seen if this vaccine reduces the risk of spread or just the severity of infection. If it reduces spread (which is plausible, if viruses, for example, don’t have a chance to reproduce in large numbers), it could short circuit many respiratory epidemics.

Imagine if this vaccine were available at the beginning of COVID. It could have provided significant protection, reducing death and morbidity, and allowed us time to study the virus and develop adaptive vaccines. That is one of the benefits – it provides broad spectrum non-specific defense. We don’t necessarily need to know anything about the pathogen for this vaccine to work, so it is ideal for novel respiratory outbreaks. It also means we don’t need to track new strains of a virus, and that pathogens cannot easily adapt to this immunity by simply mutating their proteins.

There is a lot of research ahead to study the safety and effectiveness of this vaccine in humans. Even once a vaccine is approved, more research is needed to study long term effectiveness and potential side effects. One thing to consider, for example – there is likely a reason that evolutionary forces did not favor us having our innate immunity on high alert at all times. There is often a downside to immune activity, which is mostly why you feel like crap during an infection. It’s not the bug, it’s your bodies reaction to the bug. The worst-case scenario is that this approach increases the risk of auto-immunity.

Having said that – we are not living in the world in which we evolved. We are living in a globally connected world of over 8 billion people, often in close proximity to potential animal reservoirs of pathogens. The selective pressures are likely now different than they were when we were living in largely isolated tribes. But we don’t have to wait for evolution to work its slow grim task, we can tweak our immune systems with science and technology to provide some enhanced protection when and where we need it.

The post Universal Respiratory Vaccine first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

Fascination with UFOs (unidentified flying objects) is endless. I get it – I was into the whole UFO narrative when I was a child, and didn’t shed it until I learned science and critical thinking and filtered the evidence through that lens. I credit Carl Sagan for initiating that change. In his excellent series, Cosmos (still worth a watch today), he summarized the skeptical position quite well. To paraphrase – after decades, there isn’t a single hard piece of evidence, not one unambiguous photo or video. He gave a couple of examples of evidence (widely cited at the time) that were completely useless. Now -four decades later – the situation is the same. The evidence, in a word, is crap. It is exactly what you would expect (if you were an experienced skeptic) from a psychocultural phenomenon, without any evidence that forces us to reject the null hypothesis.

So why does belief in UFOs (meaning that some of them are alien spacecraft) not only persist but are experiencing a resurgence? Ostensibly this was triggered by the release of the Pentagon videos. I have already dealt with them – they are just more low-grade evidence. In fact, as I have argued, the low-grade quality of the images is the phenomenon. UFOs, or UAPs as the Pentagon now calls them, are not an alien phenomenon, they are an “unidentified” phenomenon. Mick West has arguably done the most thorough analysis of these videos. He convincingly shows how they are just misidentified birds, balloons, and planes. If you look at the videos you will see that they are blobs and shadows and lights. They are not clear and unambiguous images of spacecraft. Believers must infer that they are spacecraft by their apparent properties – and that is where the technical analysis comes in. A sprinkle of motivated reasoning, or simply lack of expertise, is enough to convince yourself that these are fast moving large objects. But a better analysis (again, see Mick West above) shows this is not the case. They are small, moving with the wind, or flying at the speed of a bird.

But the US military is taking UAPs seriously. This is actually not a surprise – unidentified anomalous phenomena might be Chinese spy balloons, or Russian fighter planes. This has always been at the core of the government’s interest. it is now policy to scramble fighter jets for visual confirmation of anything not identifiable on radar. And now that they are doing that – 100% of UAPs so far have been identified as mundane objects, mostly balloons. In fact, the US military is happy to encourage public belief in “UFOs” because it is a convenient cover for their own top secret projects. It is not a coincidence that UFO sightings tend to cluster around military bases.

Another factor in the recent upsurge in interest is the media. The media, of course, loves stories that generate a lot of interest, and UFOs fit the bill. However, they also know that UFO stories are fringe and often based on rumor or testimony from dubious sources, so they are often relegated to “fluff” stories. They are like the ghost stories that circulate every Halloween – journalists know they are nonsense, but make great headlines. But now – the media feels they have permission from the US government to take UFO stories seriously, so they gleefully are. Here is an example from the New York Times. The author, a regular columnist, Roth Douthat, has four questions for the Trump administrations. Do they have more videos, why are there so many apparent whistle-blowers, why are some US senators calling for disclosure, and is the US government pursuing research into UFO experiencers and paranormal phenomenon (which they have in the past)?

These sound like serious questions, and so a serious journalist can write a column about them without looking silly. But the thing is – we already have the answers to these questions. The Pentagon has done a thorough analysis of all the evidence the US government has, and concluded – there is no evidence of aliens. As predicted, the whole thing is a giant nothing-burger. Except for the newer videos, most of the evidence is old and long-debunked nonsense by the same cast of characters that have been peddling this pseudoscience for decades. Why are people interested in this – because other people are interested in it. But whenever you dig down, there is simply nothing there. I have been following the UFO story for literally 50 years, and nothing has changed.

This brings me to another reason we are seeing a resurgence in interest in UFOs – because that is the natural cycle. Each generation, since the 1940s, has a fascination with UFOs. This lasts for a decade or so, then wanes for a decade or so, then comes back. This is because people get hyped up about some apparently new evidence or claim, or a movie, or now some social media video, and we get another round of people learning about UFOs for the first time. This interest lasts for a while, with many people feeling as if some big disclosure is right around the corner. They see the recent activity as a trend, rather than just as the cycle it is, and expect some big government announcement, or the proverbial aliens landing on the White House lawn.

But of course – nothing happens. Eventually, nothing becomes boring. There are always die-hards who keep the flames going, or turn their UFO interest into a job, but public interest fades and turns to something else. UFO enthusiasts then wait for another generation to forget how boring the whole thing is, or who never experienced it before, and then fan the flames back into fire, which will also eventually burn itself out.

Meanwhile, skeptics like me, who have been at this for awhile, see it coming a mile away. We can immediately respond because we have seen it all before – it’s the same tired arguments and the same lame evidence. But we still have to be careful not to seem dismissive. We are not – we’ve just been here before so we have a head start. Also we (collectively – there is a lot of dividing and conquering going on) do the detailed analysis, the hard work necessary to demonstrate convincingly that whatever new evidence is being put forward is what it is.

UFO believers reading this blog, at this point, are likely to leave in the comments – “well, what about this evidence?” Hit me. Give me your best evidence. I am happy to do a deep dive and see what we got. But you should first look for skeptical analysis of the claim – be your own most dedicated skeptic first. If you still think the evidence is worthwhile, send it my way. (And don’t tell me to read thousands of pages of low grade evidence – give me your best evidence.) Decades of making this challenge has not resulted in anything (for example), but I am willing to keep going. Also, keep in mind, if aliens were visiting the Earth, I would want to know, and if the evidence were compelling, I would have every motivation in the world to support and promote that conclusion. And I would have much to lose if I wrongfully denied a genuine phenomenon – arguably the most interesting and impactful phenomenon in human history. I would not want to be on the wrong side of that story. So yeah – convince me.

But you should be open to the possibility that you are wrong, that all the evidence is best explained as a psychocultural phenomenon without any need to invoke aliens. I strongly believe that is the case, and it would take compelling evidence to convince me otherwise. Such evidence does not exist, because if it did, we wouldn’t need to be debating this anymore. That is why believers have to invoke conspiracy theories or make the absurd claim that aliens are just teasing us with the possibility of their existence but withhold any solid evidence. Maybe that worked in the 1950s, but 75 years later it’s increasingly untenable.

The post Why UFOs Are Back first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.