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A ring of 13 carbon atoms and two chlorine atoms has a remarkable molecular structure that means you would have to go around the loop four times to return to your starting position

Reader Jon Gallant recently finished the essay collection compiled and edited by Lawrence Krauss, The War on Science:  Thirty-Nine Renowed Scientists and Scholars speak Out About Current Threats to Free Speech, Open Inquiry, and the Scientific Process.” (Luana and I have a paper in it taken from our Skeptical Inquirer paper on the ideological subversion of biology).

Jon decided to leave a review of the book on its Amazon page (his review is shown below in the Amazon rejection). Yep, his submitted review was rejected. He sent the rejection to me and I reproduce it and his emailed speculations (with permission).  I’ve put a red box around the submitted review:

At first I was puzzled, as I don’t follow Amazon reviews and know nothing about the ideology of the site or company.  Can you guess why the review was returned with requests for changes?  I suspect you’ve guessed correctly, though we can’t be sure.  I asked Jon what he thought, and here’s some of his response:

Use of the term “woke” in a less than reverential tone is no doubt classified by Amazon’s editors as “hate speech”.  After all, it makes wokies feel unsafe.  My hunch is that the dopier Communications majors from the 2010s work as review editors at Amazon.  The better-connected ones get into the editorial offices of some Nature publications we have encountered.

In truth, I can see no other explanation.  The review was not worshipful enough of wokeness, and in fact made fun of it, even expressing a hope that it would disappear.  If you have another explanation, by all means put it in the comments. I had no patience to read Amazon’s “community guidelines” to see if there were other infractions.

I don’t know if Jon will resubmit his review, but I thought that this was both sad and amusing. The other reviews (126 of them) are bimodal (70% five star, 18% one star), and it’s also amusing to look at the negative ones, most of them finding the book guilty of association with the wrong people, or not hard enough on Trump and right-wing assaults on science (not its purpose)

Taking psilocybin – the psychedelic component of magic mushrooms – eased symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder among people who did not respond to conventional treatments, and the effects lasted at least several months

Send in your good wildlife photos, as I’m out save for singletons and doubletons.

Today’s photos come from reader Jan Malik from New Jersey and are geese and DUCKS. The captions and ID’s are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Here are some Barnegat Inlet ducks (and other visitors) from the last day of this February.

Canada Goose (Branta canadensis) and Brant (Branta bernicla) in flight.  Same genus, similar body form, and a fairly recent common ancestor—only about 1–2 MYA in Pleistocene North America. Anne Elk’s (Mrs.) theory about brontosauruses could be adapted to geese: they are thin at one end, much, much thicker in the middle, and thin again at the far end. My new theory is that these two species split when the Laurentide Ice Sheet separated the American coast from the inland regions. The Brant specialized in coastal habitats and feeding on seaweeds, while the Canada Goose evolved inland, feeding mostly on herbs and grasses. Perhaps this theory is not new. Or not mine.

Arguably the biggest stars of the winter Barnegat Inlet are the Harlequin Ducks (Histrionicus histrionicus). The drakes’ plumage is so dramatic—and their calls so comical (resembling a bath rubber ducky)—that many people come to Barnegat Light just to see them. The hens’ coloration is more subdued but still lovely.

JAC: You can hear their calls on the Cornell page for this species. Just below is a hen:

Every year I see them bobbing along the jetty, sometimes tossed around by heavy seas but always masterfully avoiding the rocks. They seem attracted to heavy surf and avoid the open sea. They stay mostly in a loose flock, which in recent years appears to have declined from 20–30 ducks in 2010 to just 10–15 in the last couple of years.

Drake:

They can preen while in the water, but they do catch a breather by climbing onto slippery rocks. Their feet are set a bit farther back, like in other diving ducks, but they can walk on land—although a bit awkwardly. By late February most of them are gone, heading back north to their nesting grounds on Labrador’s whitewater rivers and streams:

Like other diving ducks, they dip their heads before diving for fish. My other theory—Theory Number Two—is that by doing so they defeat the air–water interface diffraction and better locate prey:

They are exceptionally buoyant, which makes sense given their rocky surf habitat, but it also means they must put extra effort into diving. They have to jump slightly into the air before the dive to gain momentum, then use their wings as paddles to become submerged:

I once heard that the difference between geese and ducks is that ducks can launch themselves directly into the air from a resting position, while geese need to run for a while, either on water or land. This is probably true for dabbling ducks (like Mallards), but a Harlequin—with its feet set back a bit—must run some distance to become airborne:

Another common winter visitor: the Red-breasted Merganser (Mergus serrator), drake. Their bill serration is more pronounced than in other diving ducks, helping them catch fish:

Merganser hen. These are the most sea-loving mergansers. The other two I’m familiar with—Common and Hooded Mergansers—rarely appear in coastal waters. They are said to be very active underwater predators pursuing fish, but I’ve never seen that myself:

Common Eider (Somateria mollissima), probably an immature drake in transitional plumage. They are quite large and plump, which—together with the proverbial “eider down”—makes them well adapted to nesting in the Arctic. Reportedly, hens with ducklings may form crèches on their nesting grounds (a defense against polar foxes and skuas perhaps?) One day I must see that:

Indigenous people in Papua, Indonesia, have helped scientists track down two animals that were thought to have gone extinct thousands of years ago: a relative of Australia’s greater glider and a palm-sized possum with a bizarre, elongated finger

Back in February 2025, a SpaceX rocket that had delivered 22 Starlink satellites to orbit had a malfunction. It failed to execute a planned deorbit burn and drifted for 18 days in orbit before beginning an uncontrolled descent about 100km off the west coast of Ireland. Some parts of the rocket landed in Poland, and while they didn’t injure anybody, there was enough concern about the lack of communication that Poland dismissed the head of its space agency. But that wasn't the only lasting impact of this failure. A new paper from Robin Wing and her colleagues at the Leibniz Institute for Atmospheric Physics, published in Communications Earth & Environment ties that specific rocket reentry to a massive plume of pollution for the first time.

The Alzheimer’s field is being turned on its head as mounting evidence points to the disease beginning outside the brain many years before symptoms start. This may mean we have to totally rethink how we approach preventing and treating the condition

Our so-called public servants have one set of standards for themselves and another for private citizens who dare to the challenge their government.

The post MAHA Government Doctors Feel Entitled to Falsely Smear Private Citizens in the Press While Demanding That They Not Be Falsely Smeared in the Press first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

A new ultrathin photodetector from Duke University can sense light across the entire electromagnetic spectrum and generate a signal in just 125 picoseconds, making it the fastest pyroelectric detector ever built. The breakthrough could power next-generation multispectral cameras used in medicine, agriculture, and space-based sensing.

A team of astrophysicists, cosmologists, and physicists has developed a novel way to compute the Hubble constant using gravitational waves. As our capability to observe gravitational waves improves in the future, this new method could be used to make even more accurate measurements of the Hubble constant, bringing scientists closer to resolving the Hubble tension.

When people think of supernova explosions, they're most-often thinking of Type II core-collapse supernovae, where a massive star becomes a red supergiant before collapsing on itself and exploding. New research uncovers what's going on inside the star before it explodes, and explains why SNe light curves can be different from one another.

On April 8, 2024, volunteers participating in NASA’s Eclipse Megamovie citizen science project all around the United States hurried to photograph the solar eclipse with the latest, greatest equipment, capturing groundbreaking images of the Sun’s corona.

Anyone familiar with the search for alien life will have heard of the “Goldilocks Zone” around a star. This is defined as the orbital band where the temperature is just right for liquid water to pool on a rocky planet’s surface - a good approximation for what we thought of as the early conditions for life on Earth. But what happens if that life doesn’t stay on an Earth analog? If they, like we, start to move towards their neighboring planets, the idea of a habitable zone becomes much more complicated. A new paper from Dr. Caleb Scharf of the NASA Ames Research Center, and one of the agency’s premier astrobiologists, tries to account for this possibility by introducing the framework of an Interplanetary Habitable Zone (IHZ).

An exceptionally flexible region of the spine enables falling cats to twist the front and back halves of their body sequentially to ensure a safe landing

Whether you call it a vibe shift or a paradigm shift, physicists must be ready to challenge their fundamental understanding of the universe without fear or nostalgia

The latest novel in this entirely original science-fiction series features a human-size mantis shrimp as an "uplifted" species. It's ambitious and fantastic, says sci-fi columnist Emily H. Wilson

The books, TV, games and more that New Scientist staff have enjoyed this week

Feedback is pleased to discover another delightfully unconventional unit of measurement, which is used to convey amounts of snow on Ottawa's Rideau canal

If up to 20 per cent of us really do score highly on traits related to psychopathy, we are going to need all the help offered by a compelling new book. Start by admitting your own dark traits, finds Sally Adee

Several readers astutely mentioned in comments on today’s Hili Dialogue that a primary goal of the American attack on Iran wasn’t to democratize the country, but to remove Iran as a Chinese proxy.  As Haviv Rettig Gur, a journalist who writes for the Times of Israel, argues in the piece given below, a mutualistic relationship between Iran and China has developed, with Iran providing China with cheap oil that allows the People’s Republic to build a strategic petroleum reserve (nobody else will buy that oil), and China providing Iran with missiles and sophisticated weapons to go after Israel and the West. As Gur says:

Iran is to America what Hezbollah is to Israel—the smaller second-front proxy you have to take out to have a clean shot at the main foe later on.

This is also why President Trump seems to be pursuing a strange sort of regime change—something very different from what George W. Bush or the neocons meant by the term. Trump doesn’t care one whit about democratization, or, as Venezuela showed us, about changing any element of a regime that doesn’t stand in America’s way. He’s interested in regime change in Iran only because it is fundamentally, in its founding theology, unswervingly anti-American. It is thus not swayable from the Chinese orbit by any other means.

He doesn’t need a democratic Iran, he just needs a not-anti-American Iran.

Why are we so worried about China? Because, says Gur, a potential conflict with China is in the offing—over Taiwan:

The picture that emerges from all of this is of a Chinese forward base, a linchpin of the country’s naval architecture; cyber efforts; an economic Belt and Road influence program—every element of Chinese power projection and empire-building—positioned at the throat of the global oil supply, armed with weapons designed to penetrate advanced American defenses and kill American sailors, and embedded in a strategic architecture whose explicit purpose is to constrain American military freedom in any future conflict over Taiwan.

When Iran began to look like that, it stopped being Israel’s problem and became America’s.

Click below to read, but only if you have a subscription to TFP.  They don’t allow their articles to be archived.

Gur begins by noting that this is not one war but two: America’s on the one hand and Israel on the other, with Israel having existential worries as opposed to America’s concern with China:

. . . across the world, from Brazil to Beijing, London to Karachi, the argument is the same: America is fighting Israel’s war.

But this isn’t true. And the confusion matters, because if you misread what this war is actually about, you will misread everything that follows.

This is not a war about Israel. This is not a war for Israel’s sake. Israel is a beneficiary, a capable and willing local partner, but it is not the reason America is in this fight. America is playing a much bigger game, about more than what happens in the Middle East. The subtext, that Israel exercises outsize influence or “drags Americans into wars they don’t want,” borders on the conspiratorial.

This isn’t one war, but two. There is a regional chessboard, on which Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the other Gulf states all play. Iran’s proxies, its drones and ballistic missiles, its nuclear ambitions, its funding of Hezbollah and the Houthis: All of that belongs primarily to this smaller game. Israel has always understood this board. So have the Saudis. So has everyone in the neighborhood.

But there is a second chessboard, vastly larger, on which the United States and China are the primary players. On this board, the central question of the next 30 years is being worked out: whether the American-led global order survives, or whether China displaces it. Every significant American foreign policy decision, from the pivot to Asia to the tariff wars to the posture in the Pacific, is ultimately a move on this board.

Of course dodos like me (I never claimed to be a pundit) have missed all this, but Gur gives reasons why the U.S. decided to attack now (remember that China has said it will go after Taiwan within seven years):

. . . Reports emerged in late February of a near-finalized deal to supply Iran with supersonic anti-ship cruise missiles capable of speeds exceeding Mach 3 and engineered to evade the Aegis defense systems deployed on American carrier strike groups. China was replacing Iranian government and military software with closed Chinese systems, hardening Iran against CIA and Mossad cyber operations. Joint naval exercises between China, Russia, and Iran in the Straits of Hormuz were becoming regular events, building real-time operational familiarity between the three navies. Iran had switched from the GPS system to the Chinese BeiDou system. And Iran was providing China with the port at Jask, as part of China’s “string of pearls” base system in the Indian Ocean.

The picture that emerges from all of this is of a Chinese forward base, a linchpin of the country’s naval architecture; cyber efforts; an economic Belt and Road influence program—every element of Chinese power projection and empire-building—positioned at the throat of the global oil supply, armed with weapons designed to penetrate advanced American defenses and kill American sailors, and embedded in a strategic architecture whose explicit purpose is to constrain American military freedom in any future conflict over Taiwan.

Gur adds that the U.S. has had a hard time articulating this, but I can understand why they would not want to, even if that articulation would lessen America’s opposition to the war (more than 50%).  But it wouldn’t, since the American public doesn’t think much about China.

Now the first thing I asked myself why I saw Gur’s thesis was this: What is the evidence that this is the real American strategy?  Here is what counts as evidence:

The Americans went to war together with the Israelis because that’s the best way to fight a war like this. Having a capable and loyal local ally willing to deal damage and absorb blowback lowers the costs to America and increases the chances of success. If America ever finds itself in a kinetic fight with China, it presumably expects Japan and Taiwan and South Korea to play a similar role in the fighting. It’s one hell of an operational advantage.

To Gur, the targets give away Trump’s intentions:

. . .In the first 24 hours of the war, American strikes, as confirmed by U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), focused on Iranian naval vessels, submarines, ports, and anti-ship missile positions along the southern coast. The port of Bandar Abbas, headquarters of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy, was hit. So was Jask, which China had hoped would become a permanent naval foothold on the Indian Ocean. Isfahan and Tabriz, hubs of ballistic missile production and drone assembly, were struck. The goal, explicitly stated by American officials, was not merely to degrade existing stockpiles but to destroy the industrial base from which those weapons are produced, so that China cannot spend the next few years quietly rebuilding it.

President Trump announced the operation in terms that could not have been more direct, explicitly mentioning all those elements of Iranian power—the navy, the missile production sites—that would serve as that second front in a war with China.

Many of these targets so central to CENTCOM’s efforts are no threat whatsoever to Israel.

So far from China: crickets. It’s been silent and has left Iran hanging. In truth, there’s little that China can do save join the war itself—and it’s clearly not keen to do that. As for Trump’s notable omission of words about freeing the Iranian people, or creating a democracy in Iran, Gur says “He doesn’t need a democratic Iran, he just needs a not-anti-American Iran.” Finally, as to why the U.S. has remained mum about what are supposedly its real goals, Gur says this:

So why can’t Secretary Rubio say it? Why hem and haw and offer half-hearted non-explanations to a question that has set the conservative movement aflame?

One obvious answer: They don’t want to push the Chinese to more overt responses. One should always give one’s enemy an excuse not to respond in kind, on the off chance that they don’t want to. It’s a sensible ambiguity on the world stage, but it’s causing damage at home. It may be time for the administration to speak clearly on its grand strategy—not in policy papers, but in clearly articulated statements that actually answer the good-faith questions of a great many Americans.

America went to war in Iran because Iran made itself a Chinese weapon. It didn’t need to do this, to invest so much of the administration’s political capital and of the military’s firepower, just to shore up a second-run Israeli operation. This isn’t about Israel. Iran has been a growing threat to Israel for decades, and yet Trump has always resisted intervening.

As I said, I’m no pundit, and although this all sounds plausible, it hasn’t convinced me completely. Gur makes a good argument, and one that several readers agree with. Perhaps they’re right, and if so kudos to them. But I’m depressed at the thought that if Gur is right, Trump doesn’t give a fig for freeing the beleaguered Iranian people, or about creating a democratic regime. The Iranian people are hoping for that, and perhaps we’re deceiving them.

And if we ever go to war with China, Ceiling Cat help us all!