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Kepler-51d is a giant, ultra-light “super-puff” planet wrapped in an unusually thick haze that’s blocking scientists from seeing what it’s made of. Observations from JWST revealed that this haze may be one of the largest ever detected, possibly stretching as wide as Earth itself. The planet’s low density and close orbit don’t match existing models of how gas giants form or survive. Now, researchers are left with more questions than answers about how such a strange world came to be.

A new tomato-picking robot is learning to think before it acts. Instead of simply identifying ripe fruit, it predicts how easy each tomato will be to harvest and adjusts its approach accordingly. This smarter strategy boosted success rates to 81%, with the robot even switching angles when needed. The breakthrough could pave the way for farms where robots and humans work side by side.

MIT physicists have built a powerful new microscope that uses terahertz light to uncover hidden quantum motions inside superconductors. By compressing this normally unwieldy light into a tiny region, they were able to observe electrons moving together in a frictionless, wave-like state for the first time. This discovery opens a new window into how superconductors really work. It could also help drive future breakthroughs in high-speed wireless communication.

Researchers have pushed quantum chip design into a new era by simulating every physical detail before fabrication. Using a supercomputer with nearly 7,000 GPUs, they modeled how signals travel and interact inside an ultra-tiny chip. Unlike earlier “black box” approaches, this method captures real materials, layouts, and qubit behavior. The result is a powerful new way to spot problems early and build better quantum hardware faster.

A new study put ChatGPT to the test by asking it to judge whether hundreds of scientific hypotheses were true or false—and the results were far from reassuring. While the AI got it right about 80% of the time on the surface, its performance dropped significantly when accounting for random guessing, revealing only modest reasoning ability. Even more concerning, it frequently contradicted itself when asked the exact same question multiple times, sometimes flipping answers back and forth.

After decades of searching for alien signals in narrow radio and microwave bandwidths, a new paper suggests that we take a wholly different approach. The idea is to broaden the search to a much wider range of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Scientists at Europe's CERN research center say the Large Hadron Collider's LHCb experiment has discovered a "doubly charmed" particle that's like a proton, but four times as weighty.

Astronomers have identified a strange new kind of exoplanet that challenges how scientists classify worlds beyond our Solar System. The planet, L 98-59 d, appears to contain a vast ocean of molten rock beneath its surface that traps large amounts of sulfur deep inside. Observations from the James Webb Space Telescope revealed unusual sulfur-rich gases in its atmosphere and a surprisingly low density for its size.

I am sure you can guess what this photo shows:

Yep, my babies are trotting around in the snow. Fortunately, they have a kind patron who feeds them twice a day.  Armon and Vashti are still here, and what reason would they have to go, given that they are fed two big square meals a day: nutritious duck pellets for main and tasty freeze-dried mealworms for dessert?

They are looking good, and Vashti seems positively plump.

The WHAT? Yeah, the vortons. It’s not an anime monster-hunting show. It’s not some AI startup company. It’s a…it’s a thing. I think.

Two lawsuits are being brought against giant tech firms for the dangers their apps pose to young people. Columnist Annalee Newitz says the outcome of those cases could dramatically change social media for the better

Over at the Heterodox Stem site, Iván Marinovic, a professor at Stanford, has hit on a way to measure wokeness in college curricula. He uses key words to distinguish “ideological and activist” courses from those that hew to the “Western intellectual tradition” (note the caveats in his piece), and shows that, using this measure, the curriculum of the University of Chicago over the 13 years from 2012 to2025 has more than doubled the percentage of courses whose description include woke words, while the percentage of courses described with “Western canon” words has remained relatively constant. Marinovic calls this process “curriculum degradation,” and notes this:

The University of Chicago occupies a unique position in American higher education. Its undergraduate Core Curriculum, built on the Hutchins-era Great Books model, has historically been the strongest institutional commitment to the Western canon at any major research university. If curriculum degradation is occurring even at Chicago, it is likely occurring everywhere.

Click the title below to see the article:

Here’s Marinovic’s methods

We classify every course in a university catalog using two keyword lists: a progressive list and a Western canon list, as described below. We assign a course to a category if its title or description contains at least one keyword from the category’s keyword list.

We matched via word-boundary regular expressions on the combined title and description text (case-insensitive). Word-boundary matching ensures that partial matches are avoided (e.g., the term “race” does not match “interface” or “brace”). Each course’s title and description are concatenated into a single text field; if any keyword from a given list appears within that text, the course is flagged for that category.

The progressive keyword list comprises approximately 55 terms and phrases signaling engagement with progressive social frameworks, diversity/equity/inclusion initiatives, or critical identity scholarship. These terms are organized into eleven thematic sub-categories, shown in Table 1.

Here’s Table 1:  Progressive-signal keyword list by thematic category.

And the Western canon method:

The Western canon keyword list comprises approximately 45 terms and phrases signaling engagement with the traditional Western intellectual and literary canon, spanning classical antiquity through the Enlightenment. These terms are organized into six thematic sub-categories, shown in Table 2.

This is  Table 2: Western-canon keyword list by thematic category.

The example school chosen (Marinovic suggests that this be done for other schools as a preliminary indicator of what’s going on in them):

We extract course data from thirteen annual catalogs (2012–2013 through 2024–2025). After deduplicating crosslisted courses, which appear under multiple department codes, we obtain 21,381 unique courses across 114 departments. Departments are mapped to broad areas: Humanities, Social Sciences, STEM, Professional, and Other.

Figure 1 presents the central finding. The progressive signal rose from 12.7% of the catalog in 2012–2013 to 28.3% in 2024–2025—more than doubling over thirteen years. The canon signal dropped from 13.2% to 11.9%. The progressive-to-canon ratio consequently rose from 1.0× (parity) to 2.4×.

Now you can say that this is obvious because “wokeness” or “progressivism” is a fairly recent phenomenon, and has invaded academia since most professors are liberals or Democrats. And that invasion is expected to be reflected in course content.  But this index is a way of measuring the extent of that invasion (or “degradation” as the author calls is), and seeing which universities and which feels have been the most “degraded.”

Marinovic also divided up the proportion of “progressive” versus “canon” courses in each of four area: the humanities, the social sciences, STEM (science, technology, enginnering and mathematics), and professional areas, presumably courses in medicine, business, and the laws. The conclusion, presumably for the final period, is shown in Table 3 below:

Table 3 shows that the progressive signal is highest in the Social Sciences (27.4%) and Humanities (24.6%). The progressive signal is naturally lower in STEM (7.6%) but still unexpectedly high given the technical nature of STEM content.

Indeed, I have personal experience with the increasing “progressivization” of the biological sciences:

Marinovic proposes that we might make Curriculum Content Indices for many schools, saying it takes only a few hours to do this if course information is publicly available.  How would we use thse?

Such an index would allow prospective students to assess how much of a university’s catalog engages the Western intellectual tradition versus ideological content; donors to direct funding toward institutions that maintain intellectual breadth, and policymakers to monitor trends and evaluate the effects of reform efforts.

Finally, Marinovic gives an important caveat about the data and how it should be used:

A word of caution is in order. Keyword-based textual analysis of course descriptions is a blunt instrument. A course flagged by our progressive keyword list may turn out, on closer inspection, to be a rigorous scholarly treatment of the topic; conversely, a course that escapes detection may nonetheless promote an activist agenda in practice. The signals we measure should therefore be understood as a noisy first approximation—useful for identifying broad trends and prompting further inquiry, but never a substitute for substantive evaluation of what is actually taught. Policymakers, in particular, should resist the temptation to use simple keyword counts as the basis for funding decisions or regulatory action. Our goal is to promote transparency and informed conversation, not to supply a scorecard that short-circuits careful judgment.

As far as I know, the University of Chicago is the only school to be vetted this way, but many universities have their course catalogue—though not necessarily the course descriptions—online and could be crunched in this way.  I’d love, for example, to see similar data from the University of California at Berkeley, as well as Columbia University, Barnard College, and, of course, Reed College, Swarthmore, Harvard, and Smith. And how could we forget Oberlin?

You can now buy a humanoid robot housekeeper for less than the price of a second-hand car. But before splashing out, there’s something you need to know

Oxygen has been the most important gas in our search for life among the cosmos thus far. On Earth, we have it in abundance because it is produced by biological synthesis. But that might not be the case on other planets, so even if we do find a very clear high oxygen signal in the atmosphere of an exoplanet, it might not be a clear indication that life exists there. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv, from Margaret Turcotte Seavey and a team of researchers from institutions like the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and Johns Hopkins University, adds some additional context to what else might be going on in those atmospheres. In particular, they note that if there’s even a little bit of water vapor, it can make a big difference in whether a lifeless rock looks like a living, thriving world.

People who share a bed with a partner are woken by them multiple times per night, but don’t remember most of these disturbances

People who share a bed with a partner are woken by them multiple times per night, but don’t remember most of these disturbances

A mysterious metal-rich asteroid called Psyche has been baffling scientists for over two centuries, and its true origin remains one of the biggest unanswered questions in planetary science. Is it the exposed core of a failed planet, or a chaotic mix of rock and metal forged through countless violent collisions? To find out, researchers simulated how a massive crater near Psyche’s north pole formed, revealing that the asteroid’s internal “porosity” — how much empty space it contains — may hold the key to its secrets.

This picture invariably brings tears to my eyes. It could be the logo, literally and metaphorically, for current health care policy.

The post Death Returns From Holiday first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Physicists working on the LHCb experiment have spotted an elusive and fleeting particle, a heavier and more charming cousin to the proton, that has been sought for decades

Even today, some people cling to a pre-scientific belief that germs do not cause disease.

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