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An ambitious form of climate modelling aims to pin the blame for disasters – from floods to heatwaves – on specific companies. Is this the tool we need to effectively prosecute the world’s biggest carbon emitters?

For nearly three decades, the International Space Station has been the only destination in low Earth orbit, but that will change this year. Could it be the start of a thriving economy in space?

Researchers have created microscopic robots so small they’re barely visible, yet smart enough to sense, decide, and move completely on their own. Powered by light and equipped with tiny computers, the robots swim by manipulating electric fields rather than using moving parts. They can detect temperature changes, follow programmed paths, and even work together in groups. The breakthrough marks the first truly autonomous robots at this microscopic scale.

Modelling suggests both carbon taxes and green subsidies will be necessary to decarbonise the US economy, but the inconsistent policies of successive presidents are the "worst case" scenario

Mars looks familiar from afar, but surviving there means creating a protective oasis in a hostile world. Instead of shipping construction materials from Earth, researchers are exploring how to use Martian soil as the raw ingredient. Two tough microbes could work together to bind dust into a concrete-like material and even help generate oxygen. The vision: 3D-print habitats using local resources, one experiment at a time.

The myths and misconceptions surrounding blood donation and why you might consider donating.

Links to resources from Bloodworks Northwest:

Blood Donation Need to Know

Eligibility Guidelines

Eligibility Checker

Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

A new chip-based quantum memory uses nanoprinted “light cages” to trap light inside atomic vapor, enabling fast, reliable storage of quantum information. The structures can be fabricated with extreme precision and filled with atoms in days instead of months. Multiple memories can operate side by side on a single chip, all performing nearly identically. The result is a powerful, scalable building block for future quantum communication and computing.

A new chip-based quantum memory uses nanoprinted “light cages” to trap light inside atomic vapor, enabling fast, reliable storage of quantum information. The structures can be fabricated with extreme precision and filled with atoms in days instead of months. Multiple memories can operate side by side on a single chip, all performing nearly identically. The result is a powerful, scalable building block for future quantum communication and computing.

Stars and planets are linked together in their formation, evolution, and even in their demises. But many of the details behind this are yet to be revealed. New research outlines an observing strategy that could uncover more critical details.

Without a better grasp of stellar flaring, our understanding of exoplanet habitability is at an impasse. Red dwarfs are the most numerous type of star in the galaxy, and they host many rocky exoplanets in their habitable zones. The problem is, they're known to flare so violently that it may negate their habitable zones. A group of researchers propose a new telescope designed solely to study stellar flaring.

The Prudhoe ice dome disappeared during a warm period 7000 years ago. Global warming could cause similar temperatures by 2100, showing the Greenland ice sheet’s vulnerability

There is a strong relation between the size of a galaxy's black hole and the motion of stars in the galaxy's core, known as the M-sigma relation. It turns out this relation doesn't work well for galaxies with ultramassive black holes.

South Korean astronomers are challenging the notion that the universe’s expansion is accelerating, an observation in the 1990s that lead to the theory of dark energy. This is currently very controversial, and may simply fizzle away or change our understanding of the fate of the universe.

In the 1990s astronomers used data from Type Ia supernovae to determine the rate of the expansion of the universe. Type Ias are known as standard candles because they put out the exact same amount of light. The reason for this is the way they form. They are caused by white dwarfs in a double star system – the white dwarfs might pull gas from their partner, and when that gas reaches a critical amount its gravity is sufficient to cause the white dwarf to explode. Because the explosions occur at the same mass, the size of the explosion, and therefore its absolute brightness, is the same. If we know the absolute brightness of an object, and we can measure its apparent brightness, then we can calculate its exact distance.

The astronomers used data from many Type Ia supernova to essentially map the expansion of the universe over time. Remember – when we look out into space we are also looking back in time. They found that the farther away galaxies were the slower they were moving away from each other, as if the universal expansion itself were accelerating over time. This discovery won them the Nobel Prize. The problem was, we did not know what force would cause such an expansion, so astronomers hypothesized the existence of dark energy, as a placeholder for the force that is pushing galaxies away from each other. This dark energy force would have to be significant, stronger than the gravitational force pulling galaxies together.

The South Korean astronomers, however, are challenging this conclusion. They hypothesize that perhaps Type Ia supernovae are not all created equally. Perhaps the age of the star affects the brightness, with older white dwarfs creating brighter supernova than younger ones. To determine if this is correct they analyzed over 300 Type Ias using data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) in Arizona. They claim, with high statistical significance, that the data supports the conclusion that older Type Ia supernova are brighter. If you then plug their correction into the analysis of the expansion of the universe, it turns out that the universe is currently decelerating, not accelerating.

This would not necessarily mean that dark energy does not exist. Rather they think that dark energy is weakening over time. We are already passed the point where gravity is stronger than dark energy. If true, this means the universe will not expand forever, but will eventually come back together in what is called the “Big Crunch.”

However – the rest of the astronomy community is skeptical, to varying degrees. Some argue that, while significant, the effect size is tiny and it is very easily an artifact of the analysis. This same group also made similar claims before, and those prior claims did not stand up to scrutiny. So their track record does not instill confidence.

This kind of debate among scientists is healthy. One study should not be enough to reverse a longstanding conclusion. But at the same time scientists need to be open to such challenges. In the end – the evidence will reign supreme, and will determine the consensus that emerges among astronomers. In the end, it’s hard to argue with the evidence.

The good thing about astronomy is that you can simply make more observations  This is what needs to happen, more and more detailed observations will either confirm or refute the conclusions of the South Korean researchers. Their paper will then either fade into obscurity or become a seminal paper, and perhaps even the basis of a future Nobel Prize.

Meanwhile, the debate about the ultimate fate of the universe continues. I have followed this question for decades, and it remains a fascinating question. There are no implications for us in the near term, of course, we are talking about what will happen billions or trillions of years in the future. But it is important for our understanding of the universe, and it is interesting to contemplate the ultimate fate of everything.

These are two very different vision of the future. In the Big Crunch scenario, the expansion of the universe continues to slow and eventually stops. And then the universe will slowly start coming back together. This process will accelerate until you have the opposite of the Big Bang – the entire universe collapses into a singularity. This, of course, raises the question about what happens next – will this lead to another Big Bang in an endless cycle? There is something intriguing about this.

The other possibility is that the universe simply continues to expand forever. Eventually we will experience the heat death of the universe, when there is no more energy to do anything. It is also possible that the accelerated expansion will get so great that even atoms come apart in a “Big Rip”. The big difference in this scenario is that there is no cycle – the universe is a one-off. Perhaps there are many universes, and there is a greater cycle, but our universe will die.

This question has gone back and forth over my lifetime, and perhaps it will again. This is partly because, when we look at the mass-energy of the universe it is very close to being right at the equilibrium point, the point at which expansion will slow asymptotically to zero, but not contract or rip apart. Perhaps this is because that is the actual fate of the universe – balanced right on the edge between endless expansion and the Big Crunch.

At this point I think it is reasonable to say that we don’t know. At least there is significant uncertainty, enough that subtle changes to our understanding of phenomena like Type Ia supernova can change the conclusion. But that also makes it an exciting science story to follow.

The post Challenging the Acceleration of the Universe first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

For years, we've thought of autism as lying on a spectrum, but emerging evidence suggests that it comes in several distinct types. The implications for how we support autistic people could be profound

A galaxy cluster in the early universe is 10 times hotter than it ought to be, which may reshape how we think these enormous structures formed

A person I know has, for the past year or more, been trying to convince me that Earth has been visited by UFOs, and that, indeed, some of those spacecraft have been captured along with the bodies of the piloting extraterrestrials. Her claim is that the bodies and the spaceships (presumably crashed) have been given to private companies by the government, and the craft are being reverse-engineered to suss out the technology behind the “UFOs”.  Further, the bodies of the pilots (bipedal like us, I’m told) are being examined to see what kind of life they represent.  As to why this is all being kept secret, I’m informed that there are important security considerations. But I’m not told which considerations are important enough to keep this  huge story secret.

I have read a lot of the information sent to me supposedly supporting this claim, and ultimately it all comes down to the assertions of one David Grusch, who relies on documents he can’t show people and hearsay that he can’t reveal given by others who supposedly have seen the extraterrestrials and their craft. It’s instructive to look up Grusch on Wikipedia, where you read stuff like this:

David Grusch is a former United States Air Force (USAF) officer and intelligence official who has claimed that the U.S. federal government, in collaboration with private aerospace companies, has highly secretive special access programs involved in the recovery and reverse engineering of “non-human” spacecraft and their dead pilots, and that people have been threatened and killed in order to conceal these programs. Grusch further claims to have viewed documents reporting a spacecraft of alien origin had been recovered by Benito Mussolini’s government in 1933 and procured by the U.S. in 1944 or 1945 with the assistance of the Vatican and the Five Eyes alliance.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) have both denied Grusch’s claims, stating there are no such programs and that extraterrestrial life has yet to be discovered. No evidence supporting Grusch’s UFO claims has been presented and they have been dismissed by multiple, independent experts.

Grusch also appears in an infamous 2½-hour hearing by the House Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs on “Unidentified and Anomalous Phenomena, or UAPs”. I’ve put it below. The hearing starts at 18:00, several True Believers gives testimony, and Grusch first appears at 46:45 and also later (I have not listened to the whole thing today). Note that AOC is on the subcommittee.

More from Wikipedia, including about this hearing:

On June 5, 2023, independent journalists Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal provided a story detailing Grusch’s claims of a UFO coverup by the government to The Debrief, a website that describes itself as “self-funded” and specializing in “frontier science”.  The New York Times and Politico declined to publish the story, while The Washington Post was taking more time to conduct fact-checking than Kean and Blumenthal felt could be afforded because, according to Kean, “people on the internet were spreading stories, Dave was getting harassing phone calls, and we felt the only way to protect him was to get the story out”.According to Kean, she vetted Grusch by interviewing Karl Nell, a retired Army colonel who was also on the UFO task force, and “Jonathan Grey” (a pseudonym) whom Kean described as “a current U.S. intelligence official at the National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIC)”. Kean wrote that Nell called Grusch “beyond reproach” and that both Nell and “Grey” supported Grusch’s claim about a secret UFO retrieval and reverse engineering program.

Grusch claims that the U.S. federal government maintains a highly secretive UFO retrieval program and possesses multiple spacecraft of what he calls “non-human” origin as well as corpses of deceased pilots. He also claims there is “substantive evidence that white-collar crime” took place to conceal UFO programs and that he had interviewed officials who said that people had been killed to conceal the programs.

Grusch elaborated on his claims in a subsequent interview with the French newspaper Le Parisien on June 7. He said that UFOs could be coming from extra dimensions; that he had spoken with intelligence officials whom the U.S. military had briefed on “football-field” sized crafts; that the U.S. government transferred some crashed UFOs to a defense contractor; and that there was “malevolent activity” by UFOs.

During a July 26, 2023, Congressional hearing, Grusch said that he “was informed in the course of my official duties of a multi-decade UAP crash retrieval and reverse-engineering program to which I was denied access”and that he believed that the U.S. government was in possession of UAP based on his interviews with 40 witnesses over four years. He claimed in response to Congressional questions that the U.S. has retrieved what he terms “non-human ‘biologics'” from the crafts and that this “was the assessment of people with direct knowledge on the [UAP] program I talked to, that are currently still on the program”.  When Representative Tim Burchett asked him if he had “personal knowledge of people who’ve been harmed or injured in efforts to cover up or conceal” the government’s possession of “extraterrestrial technology”, Grusch said yes, but that he was not able to provide details except within a SCIF (Sensitive compartmented information facility).

So it’s not just the government that knows this stuff, but private companies, who apparently retain for study the craft and jars of pickled aliens, or “biologics.” (It may be relevant that Grusch has a history of mental disorders, for which he’s been committed twice to institutions.)  At any rate, you can see above that not just Grusch, but also two other people who have had respectable military or government jobs, testify to the credibility of extraterrestrial craft.

The hearing itself, with all three witnesses swearing to tell the truth, has been presented to me as giving credibility of the witnesses’ stories. To me all that means is that three people believe in UFOs and extraterrestrials, and yet fail to present convincing evidence. I have no objections to a hearing, because if there were credible evidence of this stuff, the government would like to know about it. So would the rest of us, especially biologists and physicists.

Both the government and other experts who aren’t True Believers have heard the verbal evidence, but for some reason material evidence never surfaces. I’ll revert to Wikipedia for the last time:

Grusch’s assertions are primarily based on alleged documents and his claimed conversations, rather than testable evidence. Claims that the government is engaged in a conspiratorial effort to conceal evidence of extraterrestrial visitation to Earth are broadly considered untrue by the majority of the scientific community, because such claims oppose the best currently available expert information.

Joshua Semeter of NASA’s UAP independent study team and professor of electrical and computer engineering with Boston University’s College of Engineering concludes that “without data or material evidence, we are at an impasse on evaluating these claims” and that, “in the long history of claims of extraterrestrial visitors, it is this level of specificity that always seems to be missing”.  Adam Frank, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Rochester, published a critique of the Grusch claims on June 22 with Big Think. Frank writes that he does “not find these claims exciting at all” because they are all “just hearsay” where “a guy says he knows a guy who knows another guy who heard from a guy that the government has alien spaceships”.   [JAC: that’s an apt critique of the claims.] Frank also said of the Grusch account that “it’s an extraordinary claim, and it requires extraordinary evidence, none of which we’re getting”, adding “show me the spaceship”.

Where is the damn spaceship? Where are the bodies of the extraterrestrial pilots?

You can go down the rabbit hole of these claims for days, but all I’ll say is I will remain skeptical until genuine evidence comes to light—and by that I mean production of the “biologics” and their craft.  The failure of proponents to provide such evidence, which is always “kept elsewhere” and is “a secret matter of national security importance”, make me think that what we have here is true conspiracy theory. Again, reporters and skeptics should look at this evidence, but they’ve always come up with bupkes.

When I asked my friend why the greatest news story in the history of humanity has not been broken by mainstream news, I get answers involving extreme secrecy. But give me a break: there existed pickled aliens and spacecraft remains, and none of it has been verified by mainstream news outlets, not in decades? Smells like Pizzagate to me!

Finally, when I’m told that the very testimony of people with decent credentials proves that they’re correct, I respond with this: “Well, there are lots of people with decent credentials who said they have had a personal encounter with Jesus Christ.” Plenty of Americans believe in the literal truth of the divine-Jesus story and have had Jesus Encounter Experiences, despite the lack of evidence—even historical, extra-Biblical evidence for a divine, crucified-and-resurrected Son of God.  These people far outnumber True Believers in UFOs. Should we then take their testimony about Jesus seriously?

I haven’t followed this controversy closely, and perhaps readers, or people like Michael Shermer, have something to say about it. But until I see those pickled aliens, I think it’s more parsimonious to think that their existence is about as likely as that of the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot.

I believe they’re supposed to look something like the picture below. If so, it would be a remarkable example of convergent evolution following two independent origins of life on two different planets.

Peacefyre, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

A study of 160 European famines between 1500 and 1800 shows that El Niño weather events led to the onset of some famines and extended the duration of others

A host of new science books are due to hit shelves in January, by authors including Claudia Hammond, Deborah Cohen and Daisy Fancourt

Ec0logist Susan Harrison from UC Davis answered my plea for photos, and her submission today, which is the last in the tank, happens to be her 100th contribution to this site.  Kudos to Dr. Harrison, though she still has a ways to go to match the site record of John Avise.

At any rate, please follow Susan and send in your good wildlife photos. Her text and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Black Rails on a King Tide

“…The size of a sparrow and nearly impossible to see without tremendous effort… Beware confusion… Typically rare even in proper habitat. Incredibly difficult to locate even when vocalizing within mere feet of an observer; stealthily dashes around at the base of dense grass like a ninja.”  — eBird

“One of the most elusive birds in an elusive family… infamously difficult to see…. In some places, bird clubs organize field trips that search specifically for them… during particularly high tides when water levels force these small birds to the edges of marshes.”     —  All About Birds  

“Epic flooding from king tides leaves Marin County roads under water, businesses damaged”  — ABC7 News, Jan. 2, 2026

The new year began for me with the self-imposed challenge of seeing a Black Rail, Laterallus jamaicensis.  Like many other birders, I’d only ever heard one, and even that had not been easy (it entailed kayaking to a delta island where one had been heard by a boat-borne birder). Two factors were in my favor in early 2026:  the near-record high tides of Jan. 2, and the company of conservation biologist Steve Beissinger, who knows all about Black Rails in California.

We spent the morning in China Camp State Park in Marin County, across the Golden Gate from San Francisco, where shallow marshes of pickleweed (Salicornia pacifica) line the western edge of the Bay.  While Steve hadn’t studied Black Rails here, it’s a well-known place to seek them.

Over the course of 90 minutes, we watched as meandering streams and ponds swelled, water puddled on the road and then cascaded over it, and entire marshes disappeared as the shore migrated inland.   Joggers, cyclists, and drivers paused in confusion along the inundated pavement. We later learned this was the region’s highest tide since 1998.

Flooded main road of China Camp State Park:

After some exploring, Steve paused where a low, shrub-lined embankment beside the road offered rails a covered exit ramp from the water:

While we watched the waters rise, Snowy Egrets (Egretta thula) and Great Egrets (Ardea alba) avidly hunted for flood-displaced prey.  We hoped NOT to see a Black Rail in the beak of an egret!

Egrets, mainly Snowy:

Raptors including White-Tailed Kites (Elanus leucurus) took advantage of the hunting opportunity as well (although this particular rat-murderer was seen on my drive home).

White-tailed Kite:

Finally, we saw a rail fly in and dive under the Coyote Bushes (Baccharus pilularis) just in front of us.  It turned out to be a Virginia Rail (Rallus limicola), robin-sized and with a longer and more colorful beak than a Black Rail.

Virginia Rail:

But with further searching under these bushes, we found two tiny, dainty Black Rails, as well as a second Virginia Rail!   All four were foraging within the dense tangle of branches, undisturbed by their human admirers a few feet away. We were very fortunate indeed to get these closeup views.

Black Rails:

One Sora (Porzana carolina), a larger and more swimming-prone rail, circled nearby.

Sora:

Steve and the magic Coyote Bushes:

The US government is approving the drug leucovorin to address rising rates of autism, despite limited evidence that it works. This year, results from the largest trial yet should give more insight into its potential