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With Dr. Jay Bhattacharya in power, the headlines now read "Americans Trust Fauci Over RFK Jr. and Career Scientists Over Trump Officials."

The post Now That It’s His Job to Control Measles, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya Suddenly Expects People to Trust Everyone & Everything He Spent 6 Years Attacking first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

The errors that quantum computers make are holding the technology back. But recent progress in quantum error correction has excited many researchers

Gold and other heavy elements are born in some of the universe’s most violent events—but scientists still struggle to understand the nuclear steps that create them. Now, nuclear physicists have uncovered three key discoveries about how unstable atomic nuclei decay during the rapid neutron-capture process, the chain reaction responsible for forging elements like gold and platinum.

Gold and other heavy elements are born in some of the universe’s most violent events—but scientists still struggle to understand the nuclear steps that create them. Now, nuclear physicists have uncovered three key discoveries about how unstable atomic nuclei decay during the rapid neutron-capture process, the chain reaction responsible for forging elements like gold and platinum.

As AI systems began acing traditional tests, researchers realized those benchmarks were no longer tough enough. In response, nearly 1,000 experts created Humanity’s Last Exam, a massive 2,500-question challenge covering highly specialized topics across many fields. The exam was engineered so that any question solvable by current AI models was removed. Early results show even the most advanced systems still struggle — revealing a surprisingly large gap between AI performance and true expert-level knowledge.

Scientists have found a promising new way to manufacture one of industry’s toughest materials—tungsten carbide–cobalt—using advanced 3D printing. Normally, producing this ultra-hard material requires high-pressure processes that waste large amounts of expensive tungsten and cobalt. The new approach uses a hot-wire laser technique that softens the metals rather than fully melting them, allowing manufacturers to deposit the material only where it’s needed.

Scientists analyzing a gravitational-wave signal have discovered that a neutron star and black hole spiraled together on an oval-shaped orbit just before merging. This unusual motion, detected in the event GW200105, contradicts the long-held expectation that such pairs settle into nearly perfect circles before collision. The eccentric orbit suggests the system likely formed in a chaotic stellar environment with strong gravitational interactions.

Toys powered by AI show a worrying lack of emotional understanding. But we need to understand the risks and benefits of the technology so the industry can be regulated, not outright banned

What happens when a solar superstorm hits Mars? Thanks to the European Space Agency’s Mars orbiters, we now know: glitching spacecraft and a supercharged upper atmosphere.

• Any group differences in outcomes can be traced to systemic racism.
• If systemic racism exists at all, it works against so-called privileged groups.
• Abortion is murder, period.
• The sanctity of human life is a made-up concept.
• Jews have a biblical right to Israel.
• Hitler was right about a few things.
• Masculinity is inherently toxic.
• If women ran the world, we would still be living in grass huts.
• The colonialists need to give back the land they stole.
• Indigenous people need to get over the fact that they were conquered.
• Providing sex is an obligation within a marriage.
• Any sexual coercion constitutes rape.

Do any of these statements resonate? Make you angry? Do some not even merit a response?

I can’t tell you exactly how I would respond to someone who defended Hitler, but I know what I would not do: stalk him on social media, contact his employer to try to get him fired, or ask my government representative to help criminalize such talk. 

Does this make me a free speech absolutist? Not quite. Like Robert Jensen, a professor emeritus at the University of Austin and prolific blogger, I suspect that most people who call themselves free speech absolutists don’t actually mean it. They wouldn’t countenance speech like “let’s go kill a few Germans this morning. Here, have a gun.” Instead, Jensen writes they’re prepared to “impose a high standard in evaluating any restriction on speech. In complex cases where there are conflicts concerning competing values, [they] will default to the most expansive space possible for speech.”

In other words, they’re free speech maximalists. A more contemporary and nuanced variant of absolutism, the maximalist position grants special status to free speech and puts the burden of proof on those who wish to curtail it. While accepting some restrictions in time, place, and manner, free speech maximalism defaults to freedom of content. It aligns with the litmus test developed by U.S. Supreme Court Justices Hugo Black and William O. Douglas, which holds that government should limit its regulation of speech to speech that dovetails with lawless action:

Let’s go kill a few Germans? Not kosher. 
The only good German is a dead one? Fair game.

Some pundits view this position as misguided. A 2025 Dispatch article titled “Is Free Speech Too Sacred?” laments America’s descent into an era of “free speech supramaximalism,” in which “not only must speech prevail over other regulation, but nearly everything is sooner or later described and defended as speech.” A New Statesman essay about Elon Musk, written a few months before he acquired Twitter (now X), decries Musk’s “maximalist conception of free speech usually adopted by teenage boys and libertarian men in their early 20s, before they realise its limitations and grow out of it.” The implication: free speech maximalism is an unserious pitstop on the way to more mature thinking. Only testosterone-soaked young men, drunk on their first taste of freedom, would spend more than a minute on such a naïve view.

This 69-year-old woman disagrees. I grew into my passion for free speech during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the pressure to conform in both word and deed reached an intensity I had never witnessed before. Any concerns about the labyrinthine lockdown rules elicited retorts like “moral degenerate” or “mouth-breathing Trumptard.” (Ask me how I know.)

Unexpectedly jolted into awareness of free speech principles, I began reading John Stuart Mill and Jean-Paul Sartre and writing essays about freedom of expression in the COVID era. One thing led to another, and in 2025 the newly minted Free Speech Union of Canada found a spot for me on its organizing committee. What most of us in the group shared, along with age spots and facial wrinkles, was a maximalist position on free speech. Perhaps we’re all immature. Or maybe we’ve lived long enough to understand exactly what we lose when free speech goes AWOL.

But but … critics sputter … what about hate speech? Free speech maximalism posits that you can’t regulate an inherently subjective concept. As Greg Lukianoff and Ricki Schlott note in their 2024 book The Cancelling of the American Mind, “as soon as you start legislating based on a concept as loosely defined and subjective as offense, you open the floodgates to every group and individual claim of offense.” This argument may well explain why Canada’s proposed Bill C9—the Combatting Hate Act—remains stalled after protracted parliamentary debate.

Is “you cannot change sex” hate speech or merely opinion? Is “you have a big Black butt” an offensive remark? It depends on who says it, how it’s said, and who hears it. One person may react to the big butt comment with reflexive outrage, while another may simply shrug. When said tenderly to a lover, the statement may elicit a full-throated laugh. Offense is in the eye of the beholder. 

Someone can tell you that the sky is green, or that women can’t think logically, or that Hitler was right about some things, and you allow the words to bounce off your emotional core. It’s a liberating habit of mind. 

A case in point: In 2017, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office refused to register the name “The Slants” (an Asian rock band) because of its derogatory, or hateful, connotations. The bandleader sued and the Supreme Court ultimately agreed that “giving offense is a particular viewpoint” and a law restricting expression on the basis of viewpoint violated the First Amendment.

Here’s the thing: when you embrace viewpoint diversity as an ideal, you tend to get less offended about things. You may profoundly disagree with a statement, but it won’t cause you to puff up in outrage. Someone can tell you that the sky is green, or that women can’t think logically, or that Hitler was right about some things, and you allow the words to bounce off your emotional core. It’s a liberating habit of mind. 

And if you do get offended? Big whoop. You’ll survive. During a recent bus trip from Whistler to Vancouver my seatmate, a doctor, took it upon himself to share his candid opinions about women with me: they can’t take a raunchy joke, they make poor leaders, they’re responsible for cancel culture, and society would work better if they stayed home. Ugh. Seriously? But I survived. I wasn’t traumatized. Truth be told, I quite enjoyed our conversation. He listened as much as he spoke. I even found a few grains of value in his arguments, and perhaps a couple of my retorts gave him pause. And that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Humans of all stripes challenging and learning from each other. 

Here I must pause to express disappointment in my own sex. Women, I have found, value free speech less than men do, and studies corroborate my perception. In one survey, 71 percent of men said they gave priority to free speech over social cohesion, while 59 percent of women held the opposite view. An article reporting on the survey affirmed that “across decades, topics, and studies, women are more censorious than men.” Boo.

Even with carte blanche to express ourselves, it’s impossibly difficult for us humans to lay bare our true thoughts. Self-censorship is baked into our DNA. Free speech maximalism serves as a counterweight to this force. It allows us to rise, even if timidly, above the lead blanket of social conformity flung over us by the finger-wagging classes. By exposing little bits of our true selves, we shed light on the glorious contradictions in the human condition—a benefit that serves not just angry young men, but women with age spots and everyone else.

To those concerned about the dangers of loosening our tongues, I offer Greg Lukianoff’s bracing maxim: “You are not safer for knowing less about what people really think.” 

Rocky planets are found in abundance around M-type stars (red dwarfs), so finding another one doesn't always generate headlines. But an international team of astronomers say that one recent M-dwarf rocky planet found by TESS is especially noteworthy. This one can serve as a benchmark for comparative studies of this type of exoplanet and their at-risk atmospheres.

Astronomers say unusual readings from a star system 11,000 light-years away suggest that two of the planets circling the star crashed into each other, creating a huge, light-obscuring cloud of rocks and dust.

A neutron star merger is an extraordinary event. It features extremely powerful, chaotic magnetic fields that generate extremely energetic photons. Supercomputer simulations show that the extreme gamma-ray photons created in the mayhem can't even escape the chaos.

Body mass index (BMI) is used as a global standard for measuring health, but does it actually tell you anything about how healthy you are on an individual level? Carissa Wong explains the problems with this flawed tool

The story of a wildflower that adapted to a severe drought in California raises hopes that evolution will come to the rescue of species hit by climate change, but there are limits

So why should we expect interstellar comets like 3I/ATLAS and 'Oumuamua and even to some extent Borisov to be different-different?

Two popular quantum computing algorithms for problems in chemistry may have very limited use even as quantum hardware improves

The Free Press and CBS News (Bari Weiss is involved in both organizations) is hosting an ongoing series of “town hall” interviews and debates, the topic being “Things that matter.” The series is sponsored by the Bank of America.

A few weeks ago the series included a episode of interest to many of us, a debate between Steven Pinker and Ross Douthat on “Do we need God.” These gentlemen should need no introduction, save to add that this debate probably arose because of Douthat’s new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should be Religious, a book that he promoted widely (see some of my takes on it here). The video of that debate went online yesterday.

Here’s part of the website’s intro to the debate:

Today, nearly a third of Americans claim no religious affiliation, which would have been unimaginable a generation ago.

But the story of religion in the West is much more complicated than simple decline. In the past few years, we’ve entered what feels like a religious revival, or at least a leveling off in the decline of faith. Even as our society becomes more technologically advanced, many people are searching more intensely for meaning, purpose, and moral clarity. In other words, the question of faith hasn’t disappeared. If anything, it is even more urgent.

For years, intellectuals predicted that as religion receded, society would become calmer, more rational, and more scientific. Shed religious superstition, the theory went, and we would inherit a more enlightened public life. Instead, many societies haven’t become less fervent so much as differently fervent—driven by conspiracy, tribalism, and forms of moral conflict that often feel almost cosmic in intensity.

The premise of our Things That Matter debates, sponsored by Bank of America, is simple but essential. We want to revive the tradition that has long made the United States exceptional: our ability to argue openly across deep divides while still remaining part of the same civic community. Disagreement does not have to mean contempt. And since religion is one of the most politically charged topics in public life, it felt fitting to begin here.

Where does morality come from without God? Are our ideas of human dignity, moral obligation, and human rights ultimately grounded in a transcendent reality—or are they products of human reason alone? Are the apparent benefits of religion simply the community and rituals it nurtures, rather than the truth of its claims?

To explore these questions, we brought together two formidable public intellectuals: cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, author of Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, and New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, author of Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics.

You can hear the 57-minute debate by clicking below (I hope). It’s moderated by lawyer and commentator Sarah Isgur, who seems to be a secular Jew. It begins with summaries by Douthat and Pinker (about 4 minutes each), and then Isgur asks questions to Pinker and Douthat, questions that were clearly given to the debaters in advance (they have notes to answer them).

My take: Pinker wiped the floor with Douthat. Of course I’m biased, but Douthat’s arguments were lame, and he didn’t even dwell on the “science-y” arguments he made when touting his book (fine-tuning, consciousness, etc.). (Steve could have rebutted those, too.) Instead, Douthat says that “God self-evidently exists” and doesn’t rebut Pinker’s arguments showing the well-known negative correlation between religiosity of countries (or American states) and their well being. Douthat also makes quasi intelligent-design arguments, one of which is that our minds were created by God to help us understand the universe. I guess he doesn’t understand evolution.

Audience questions, chosen in advance, begin about 19 minutes in (the debaters apparently knew the selected audience questions, too). They’re interspersed with more questions from the moderator.  The best of her questions is at the end (55:15): “What is something that each of you would concede tonight—a point that the other made that you found compelling—that made you perhaps question some of your own positions on this?”

I would have preferred more of a slugfest, one in which Pinker and Douthat addressed each other, as they often do in Presidential debates (there’s a bit of that). This is all polite and respectful, but that detracts from what I like to see in a debate. But that’s due to the organizers, not the participants. And, sadly, there are no before-and-after votes. In my view, humanism won hands down over religion.

Fentanyl-related overdose deaths fell by nearly 30 per cent in the space of a year in the US, which could represent a significant turning point in the country's opioid addiction crisis

MIT physicists have observed the first clear evidence that quarks create a wake as they speed through quark-gluon plasma, confirming the plasma behaves like a liquid.