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Einstein told us that massive objects bend light and he was of course, right. Across the universe, giant galaxies are acting as natural telescopes, warping and distorting the light of objects behind them into spectacular arcs and rings. Now the Euclid space telescope wants your help to find them and the scale of the hunt is unlike anything attempted before.

If humans are ever going to live permanently on Mars, someone is going to have to work out where all the raw materials, the food, they oxygen or the material for the structures to name just a few. A new study has tackled that unglamorous but absolutely critical question and the answer involves robots, asteroids, and one of the most complex supply chains ever designed.

NASA's planet hunting telescope has been busy. A new study has just sifted through the light of over 83 million stars and emerged with more than 11,000 potential worlds, including a confirmed giant planet orbiting a distant star. The results don't just add to our catalogue of planets. They fundamentally change where we look for them.

On April 17th, engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) sent commands to shut down an instrument aboard Voyager 1 called the Low-energy Charged Particles experiment, or LECP. The nuclear-powered spacecraft is running low on power, and turning off the LECP is considered the best way to keep humanity's first interstellar explorer going.

It’s well known that most American academics lean towards the Left (I’m one), and that this trend is increasing over time. Here’s a plot of the political leaning of academics made by Sam Abrams (a politics and government prof at Sarah Lawrence) shown on the website of the Heterodox Academy. The trend is clear, and it’s the same among many surveys of American academics.

If I was asked ten years ago to explain this difference and also the trend over time, I wouldn’t have been able to give an answer, though now various places have suggested self-selection: academia by its very nature of free expression and (supposed) favoritism of argument and open ideas, favors liberals over conservatives. Here’s from The Independent Review:

The very nature of political inquiry is implicated here as well. Some argue that because academia focuses on expanding ideas, it is inherently opposed to conservatism, which seeks, in a nod to Buckley, to yell “Stop!” In some respects, a liberal-leaning academia should be expected to some degree. The confounding reality now, though, is that many liberal academics agree it is vital to limit ideas they deem harmful.

This paper in Theory and Society gives multiple explanations, including self-selection:

Results indicate that professors are more liberal than other Americans because a higher proportion possess advanced educational credentials, exhibit a disparity between their levels of education and income, identify as Jewish, non-religious, or non-theologically conservative Protestant, and express greater tolerance for controversial ideas.

But lately I’ve been hearing another explanation, a self-aggrandizing one offered by liberal thinkers themselves. It was originally stated by Stephen Colbert at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

“Reality has a well-known liberal bias.”

Now what does that mean?  I suppose you can interpret it as another way of saying what’s above: universities, whose job is to find out the truth (“reality”) tend to attract liberals.  But I don’t think that’s what the phrase is supposed to mean. I think that Colbert meant, and others mean, that reality itself has a tendency to buttress Left-wing views.  That’s what Grok says when asked to explain how the Left uses the phrase:

Often deployed earnestly (or semi-earnestly) to argue that empirical evidence on topics like climate change, inequality, public health data, or social issues tends to support center-left policy conclusions more than conservative ones. The implication: “Stop calling facts ‘liberal bias’—reality just doesn’t align with your priors.”

And that may indeed be true, but it reverses the causes of what’s meant: “the views of liberals are more often supported by the facts than are the views of conservatives or moderates.”

Well, one can argue about even that (e.g., climate change on one hand and Israel on the other), but what bothers me is that the quote implies that reality itself leads to liberalism.  But reality has no ideology: it’s simply what’s true about the Universe. Evolutionary biology itself gives just the facts, though those facts can be accepted by liberals or rejected by conservatives like religious creationists. How one deals with the facts depends on one’s upbringing and predisposition.

Actually, anyone studying reality—trying to find the truth—had best abandon any ideological slant beforehand, as ideology impedes the search for truth. The methodology of science itself—hypothesis testing, pervasive doubt, double-blind testing, the use of math and statistics, publication and communication, and empirical observation—is not ideological, and does not lead one to either the Left or Right.

This paper from BioScience, written by a philosopher and an evolutionary molecular biologist, shows that studying reality itself is best done in an atmosphere of ethnical neutrality. Click screenshot to read.

The authors argue first that ideological neutrality is important in finding the truth:

Arguably, a more feasible solution to the new demarcation problem is an old solution: when engaging in the core activities of scientific research, scientists should strive to eliminate the influence of all non-epistemic (e.g., ethical and political) values from the work they are conducting and (importantly) reviewing—at least to the extent that this is humanly possible. Like the ideal of a perfect democracy, the ideal of perfect ethical or political neutrality is probably never attainable in practice. Nonetheless, it is an ideal that motivates scientists to identify and hold each other accountable for any non-epistemic biases that might infiltrate and potentially distort scientific reasoning.

They then say that science is best conducted employing four Mertonian norms (Robert Merton was an American sociologists who wrote a lot about the sociology of science):

Merton’s first norm, perhaps inappropriately called “communism,” “prescribes the open communication of findings to other scientists and correlatively proscribing secrecy” (Zuckerman and Merton 1971).

. . . Merton’s second norm—universalism—states that personal attributes of a scientist, such as race, gender, nationality, religion, class, or political affiliation, are irrelevant when evaluating their scientific work. This norm functions epistemically as a corrective against all possible forms of discrimination other than merit.

. . . Merton’s third value, organized skepticism, encourages scientists to remain open to future falsification. This involves considering “all new evidence, hypotheses, theories, and innovations, even those that challenge or contradict their own work” (Anderson et al. 2010).

. . . Merton’s fourth norm called “disinterestedness” is perhaps the most controversial. Taken literally, this norm seems to require of scientists that they set aside personal goals in the pure pursuit of truth. Even the most careful scientist is vulnerable to confirmation bias (Wiens 1997). The expectation that scientists should behave as if they had no stake in the outcomes of their research is meant to counteract the effects of wishful thinking.

Now the authors discuss the opposition to these norms, and problems that arise when using them, but I think it’s useful to recognize that setting aside ideology is the best and fastest way to understand reality.

I suppose this post is a long-winded way of exporessing what I see as a self-aggrandizing phrase, and one that distorts the way that finding truth really works, but I’ve heard the phrase often enough to dissect it a bit.

The upshot: neither morality or ideology can be derived from reality, but those of a certain ideological or moral bent may rely on reality more than those of other stripes.

ASTEP, the Antarctic Search for Transiting ExoPlanets, a small visible telescope operating at Concordia station, continues making a real impact in characterizing odd new exoplanetary systems.

I think this was news commentary, but I didn’t hear the whole show: just a snippet on my car radio. At any rate, one commenter said this:

 “Joe Biden is probably the last Democratic President for generations who will be in favor of Israel.”

One could say that the Democrats are taking a position of neutrality, favoring neither Israel or its opponents (e.g., Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, or Hamas), but I doubt that is the case. The Democratic Party is being taken over by so-called “progressives,” and they are opposed to Israel in general—not just “Zionism” (which means Israel’s existence as a state), and not just Netanyahu.  This, according to a poll of Palestinians  taken in the West Bank and Gaza two years ago, is who the Democrats are and will be favoring:

According to the poll, only seven percent of Gazans blamed Hamas for their suffering. Seventy-one percent of all Palestinians supported Hamas’s decision to attack Israel on October 7 — up 14 points among Gazans and down 11 points among West Bank Palestinians compared to three months ago. Fifty-nine percent of all Palestinians thought Hamas should rule Gaza, and 70 percent were satisfied with the role Hamas has played during the war.

Before October 7, Fatah would have defeated Hamas in a head-to-head vote of all Palestinians 26 to 22 percent. If elections were held today, Fatah would lose to Hamas 17 to 34 percent. Eighty-one percent of respondents were dissatisfied with Abbas, up from 76 percent before the war. Sixty-two percent did not view the recent resignation of former PA Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh as a sign of reform. And 65 percent of Palestinians think the PA is a burden on the Palestinian people. Among likely voters, 56 percent supported Marwan Barghouti, who is serving multiple life sentences for his role in the murder of Jews during the Second Intifada. Thirty-two percent supported Qatar-based Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, and 11 percent supported Abbas.

Only 5 percent of Palestinians think Hamas’s massacre on October 7 constitutes a war crime.

The poll was taken by a Palestinian organization, “the Ramallah-based non-profit Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research.”  And we have this breakdown of Democratic support (almost nil) from The Arab Center:

 On April 15, 2026, the United States Senate considered two resolutions to block nearly $450 million of arms sales to Israel over concerns about human rights violations and the US-Israel war on Iran. With pro-Israel Republicans controlling the Senate, the defeat of these resolutions, introduced by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), was predictable. Indeed, the first resolution, to stop a $295 million sale of bulldozers that Israel has used in the past to destroy civilian homes, lost in a 59-40 vote; the second, to halt a $151 million sale of 12,000 1,000-pound bombs, failed 63-36. The surprise was that more than three-quarters of the 47-member Democratic caucus voted to halt at least one of the sales—an unprecedented number.

Jews were reliably Democratic before the war, and Democrats were reliable friends of Israel. Brothers and sisters, friends and comrades, those days are gone. Democrats are not only ignoring Hamas’s war crimes and avowed desire to destroy Israel, but also favoring an oppressive, misogynistic, and truly genocidal regime against the only democratic state in the Middle East.  And no, I don’t think it’s just animus against Netanyahu or “Zionism” that’s motivating this change.  I think that Democratic opposition to Israel would be nearly as strong if Israel had some other Prime Minister. And it’s not “Zionism” they oppose, either, for that’s just the new euphemism for “Judaism”, for Zionism is just the recognition of the validity of the state of Israel as a refuge for Jews. (Do these people oppose the many explicitly Muslim states as examples of “Islamism”? If so, I haven’t heard about it.)

Israel (and Jews) are now seen as oppressors in the “oppressor-victim” narrative that’s behind wokeness. And the “oppression” by Israel involves the Two Big Lies: Israel is “genocidal” and “an apartheid state.” (For a refutation of the “genocide” canard go here, and of the “apartheid” canard go here).  We are seeing the Democratic Party becoming more antisemitic and anti-Enlightenment. For Democrats like me, this is depressing.  I’m not a one-issue candidate but I’m still Jewish, and how am I to vote for someone who is anti-Israel?

I now have three batches plus some singletons, and so we’ll have semi-regular photos for a while, at least.  Today’s batch of tidal invertebrate photos, and one video, comes from math professor Abby Thompson at UC Davis. Abby’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. The video is also hers.

April tidepools, and a mystery den.

Starting with a video of a Ctenophore, Pleurobrachia bachei (Pacific sea gooseberry, a ‘comb jelly’). All appearances to the contrary, this is in a different phylum (Ctenophora) from the “jellyfish” of my earlier post, which are in the phylum Cnidaria.   The flashing lights are the cilia in the “combs” that run down the sides, used for locomotion.  This one wasn’t moving very much, but I was surprised it was moving at all.   I picked it up off the sand quite a way above the water line, and dumped it into a shallow pool to take a photo.    It seemed to be recovering pretty well from what I thought was death.   It’s about the size of a walnut.

Sea urchin “test”, or internal skeleton. Probably Strongylocentrotus purpuratus:

Ophiopholis aculeata (daisy brittle star):

Bispira pacifica (feather duster worm):

Close up of ‘feathers’ of pacifica:

Genus Eupentacta (sea cucumber):

Phoronis ijimai (tentative- the white things). This is a species of horseshoe worm, which lives in tubes.   I haven’t seen this species before, and it was in an awkward spot, so it was hard to get a good photo.   The photo below that is from a few years ago of a worm from the same family, so you can see their general shape better:

Phoronopsis harmeri (from July 2021) (same family):

Anthopleura artemisia (moonglow anemone):

And a few nudibranchs:

Triopha maculata (nudibranch):

Tenellia laguna (nudibranch):

Acanthodoris rhodoceras (nudibranch):

Rostanga pulchra (nudibranch):

Lastly the mystery den. Our entire front yard seems to have been tunneled under, with at least three major entrances- this pair of holes is just one of them.  The holes are large, about 10 inches across.  We’re dreaming of badgers, would be very happy with foxes, and really hoping it’s not skunks (I love skunks, but not in the front yard).  A wildlife cam is the next purchase:

Camera: Olympus TG-7.   Thanks as usual to some experts on inaturalist.

The giant planets in our solar system—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—have challenged our understanding of planetary formation and evolution. Specifically, their atmospheric formations and compositions have provided awe-inspiring images from spacecraft and given scientists key insights into the interior mechanisms of these massive worlds. But what about exoplanets? What can their atmospheres teach scientists about their formation, evolution, composition, and interior mechanisms? And how do longstanding exoplanet models stack up against the real thing?

As I write this the week of April 20, 2026, both mainstream media and social media are chockablock full of coverage of the disappearance or death of eleven (and counting) U.S. scientists who worked on UFOs, nuclear weapons, military defense, propulsion systems, or other related fields (a category that keeps growing as new deaths or disappearances are identified not associated with one of the original categories).

House Oversight Chair James Comer, for example, told Fox News “Congress is very concerned about this. Our committee is making this one of our priorities now because we view this as a national security threat,” adding “there’s a high possibility that something sinister is taking place here.”

Congressman Eric Burlison (R) told Fox News “This has all the hallmarks of a foreign operation,” and suggested to Elizabeth Vargas at NewsNation that it could be China, Russia, or Iran behind the cabal. Famed physicist Michio Kaku opined “If 10 scientists suddenly die or vanish who all have access to sensitive research, this is cause for national concern.” Even President Trump admitted that this is “pretty serious stuff…some of them were very important people,” but added “I hope it’s random.”

It’s random, Mr. President. Connecting a small cohort of individuals from a wide range of fields to deaths or disappearances is an example of what I call patternicity, or the tendency to find meaningful patterns in random noise. It is also a case study in what cognitive psychologists call base rate neglect, or the tendency to focus on specific, vivid, or anecdotal evidence and ignore statistical generalizations that better explain the phenomenon.

One of the eleven scientists, for example, Amy Eskridge, who was president of the Institute for Exotic Science (an organization she co-founded) and worked on anti-gravity propulsion and electrostatic propulsion systems, died by suicide of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. How unusual is that? According to the Johns Hopkins University Center for Gun Violence Solutions, 27,300 people die each year by gun-inflicted suicide in the U.S. That’s the base rate, and Eskridge’s own non-conspiratorial family accepts the fact that Amy was another lamentable casualty of gun violence and suicidality and not the victim of a vicious UFO cabal. “Scientists die also, just like other people,” explained her father Richard.

Most of the other scientists have similar prosaic (albeit heartbreaking) explanations. Monica Reza, who worked on orbital communication systems, for example, disappeared while hiking in the Angeles National Forest near Mount Waterman in California, which is a remote forested area near where I live in which people go missing every year. Although she was accompanied by two other experienced hikers who reported that she just dropped off the side of the trail, I have done a fair amount of hiking and mountain biking in those mountains and well know that there are countless precipitous cliffs off which one could easily fall off and disappear into thick brush below (which is how I broke my collarbone on a mountain bike ride in 1991).

A similar disappearance is that of retired Major General William Neil McCasland, who was Director of Air Force Research Lab who worked on hypersonics, directive energy systems, and advanced propulsion technology, who went missing during a wilderness hike on February 27, 2026 in New Mexico, apparently taking with him his wallet and a .38 caliber revolver and leather holster (leaving behind his phone and prescription glasses). According to his wife, McCasland had been experiencing short-term memory loss, medical issues, anxiety, and a lack of sleep, adding that she suspected he “planned not to be found” and, in any case, “He retired from the [Air Force] almost 13 years ago and has had only very commonly held clearances since. It seems quite unlikely that he was taken to extract very dated secrets from him.”

Before we jump to conspiratorial speculations on these particular vanishings, consider the fact that somewhere between 1,200 and 1,600 people disappear in America’s National Parks annually in the U.S., a stunning number that shrinks by comparison to the over 500,000 people who go missing each year according to the FBI. That’s a base rate one should never neglect and likely is the explanation for the disappearance of 48-year-old government contractor Steven Garcia in August of 2025, also in New Mexico, who worked on nuclear and aerospace research, carrying a handgun and also leaving behind his phone, keys, wallet and car. Anecdotally weird? Sure. Statistically out of the ordinary for missing persons? No.

The rest of the outcomes are equally unsurprising and not out of the ordinary: Michael Hicks “undisclosed cause of death” was in reality, according to the LA County Coroner, caused by arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease, for which the CDC and the American Heart Association document over 900,000 Americans die each year due to this and related heart diseases. 

Plasma physicist Nuno Loureiro was murdered by a revenge-seeking ex-classmate from the 1990s, who confessed that he’d been planning it for years and that he was envious and resentful of Loureiro’s success. Disturbing, but not mysterious.

Astronomer Carl Grillmair, a 67-year-old Caltech professor who worked on exoplanets, stellar streams, and near-earth objects, was shot to death in February 2026 on the front porch of his rural home in Antelope Valley, CA (about a hundred miles from Caltech out in the desert outside Los Angeles), by 29-year-old Freddy Snyder, a known criminal with a long rap sheet that included carjacking and burglary, including on Grillmair’s property months before, which the astronomer responded to by calling the police on him (as one would rationally do). Again, troubling and tragic, but not inexplicable or grand conspiratorial.

And so on.

The Internet, especially X, is rapidly filling up with additional confusions over these alleged cabals. One Dr. John Brandenburg, a self-identified “plasma physicist” who works on “fusion energy and advanced space propulsion,” with “Phd” in his X username, told his 22.2k followers (see screenshot below) that the death of an “antigravity researcher” named Dr. Ning Li, who was stuck by a vehicle and sustained brain damage that would take her life many years later, was actually the victim of a murderous conspiracy: 

Dear Friends, Like Dr. Ning Li, antigravity researcher, professor John Mack of Harvard, Pulitzer Prize winner, and a Psychiatrist researching UFO abductees, was also run over by a car. This happened in London in 2004. This must end, and whoever is responsible brought to justice.

In fact, Dr. Li died of Alzheimer’s disease in 2021 at the age of 78, following a long health decline after a 2014 automobile accident where she was struck by a vehicle while crossing a street at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and sustained permanent brain damage. As I explained to Dr. Brandenberg in my response to his post on X: 

In the US ~7,500 pedestrians are killed in traffic crashes annually. Globally, WHO reports ~ 1.19 million deaths/year. Before you concoct wild conspiracy theories about UFO people being run over, stop neglecting the base rate.

The tireless UFO disclosure activist and one-time government insider Lue Elizondo went on Chris Cuomo’s popular podcast to explain that UFO disclosure activists and former (and present) government insiders are being murdered, which as I also pointed out on X (see screen shot below) is just what one would do if you didn’t actually believe that you could be murdered yourself.

 And in this mode, I also pointed out on X all the proponents of UFO and UAP disclosure who have not been murdered or disappeared, which again as a counterfactual would seem to negate what is on the table with this so-called mystery, namely that such people are being murdered by some nefarious “they” purportedly operating in the name of some government agency or private corporation.

More generally, this phenomenon is also emblematic of what I call the fallacy of excluded exceptions, an illustration for which can be seen in a 2x2 matrix of four cells (see figure below). Cell 1 represents our mystery, namely UFO and nuclear/military scientists who go missing or are found dead before old age. What about all the UFO and nuclear/military scientists who do not go missing or are not found dead before old age (Cell 2)? Or the non-UFO and non-nuclear/military scientists who go missing or are found dead before old age (Cell 3)? Or the non-UFO and non-nuclear/military scientists who do not go missing or are not found dead before old age (Cell 4)? Suddenly our mystery disappears. There’s nothing unusual to explain in the broader context of everything else that could happen but are ignored in our focus on just the combination we’re interested in exploring.

Keep this matrix of possibilities in mind as we hear about additional Cell 1 examples in the coming days and weeks, such as the one posted by Representative Anna Paulina Luna (R) on April 21, 2026 (see screenshot below), about “the tragic passing of David Wilcock,” citing the biblical passage of John 8:32, which reads “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

What truth is that? David Wilcock was an American paranormal writer and YouTube influencer (over 500,000 followers) deeply involved in the UFO “disclosure movement”, who suggested that he might be the reincarnation of the famed early 20th century psychic Edgar Cayce, that he is in telepathic contact with space aliens, and that reptilian aliens inhabit parts of Antarctica where they are preparing for an invasion to take over the world’s governments and banks. 

Sadly, Wilcock died by suicide the morning of April 20, 2026. Although Luna suggests otherwise, according to the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office, “The emergency communications specialist who took the call suspected the caller was experiencing a mental health crisis.” Additional details noted that “officers reportedly reached around 11:02am and tried to make contact with the male who was outside his residence holding a weapon.” 

Again, regretfully but necessarily, we must consider the base rate for this issue: according to the CDC nearly 50,000 Americans every year die by suicide, around half of which are struggling with mental health issues. As such, and woefully but realistically, I think most of us can agree that if you think you are telepathically communicating with alien beings and you think they may be trying to take over the world, you may not be fully sound of mind.

No doubt more deaths and disappearances will be announced in the coming weeks as believers go digging around for more examples of Cell 1, but keep the other cells in mind, along with these other principles of critical thinking, before jumping to unwarranted conspiratorial conclusions.

Scientists have created tiny “optical tornadoes” — swirling beams of light that twist like miniature whirlwinds — using a surprisingly simple setup based on liquid crystals. Instead of relying on complex nanotechnology, the team used self-organizing structures called torons to trap and manipulate light, causing it to spiral and rotate in intricate ways. Even more impressively, they achieved this effect in light’s most stable, lowest-energy state, making it far easier to generate laser-like beams with these unusual properties.

Scientists have created tiny “optical tornadoes” — swirling beams of light that twist like miniature whirlwinds — using a surprisingly simple setup based on liquid crystals. Instead of relying on complex nanotechnology, the team used self-organizing structures called torons to trap and manipulate light, causing it to spiral and rotate in intricate ways. Even more impressively, they achieved this effect in light’s most stable, lowest-energy state, making it far easier to generate laser-like beams with these unusual properties.

A major physics experiment has uncovered evidence for a strange new form of matter, where a fleeting particle gets trapped inside a nucleus. This exotic state may reveal how mass is generated, suggesting that particles can weigh less when surrounded by dense nuclear matter. The findings support long-standing theories about how the vacuum of space influences mass.

A major physics experiment has uncovered evidence for a strange new form of matter, where a fleeting particle gets trapped inside a nucleus. This exotic state may reveal how mass is generated, suggesting that particles can weigh less when surrounded by dense nuclear matter. The findings support long-standing theories about how the vacuum of space influences mass.

In the chaotic first moments after the Big Bang, ripples in spacetime may have done more than just echo through the cosmos—they could have helped create dark matter itself. New research suggests that faint, ancient gravitational waves might have transformed into particles that eventually became the invisible substance shaping galaxies today.

In the chaotic first moments after the Big Bang, ripples in spacetime may have done more than just echo through the cosmos—they could have helped create dark matter itself. New research suggests that faint, ancient gravitational waves might have transformed into particles that eventually became the invisible substance shaping galaxies today.

It turns out that even after studying our solar system in depth and discovering more than 6,100 exoplanets across more than 4,500 exoplanetary systems, not all solar systems are created equal. The longstanding notion is that planets orbit almost entirely in the same orbital path, also called an orbital plane. But what if an exoplanetary system was found to have exoplanets that not only orbit in different planes, but also exhibits changing behavior regarding when they pass in front of their star?

The Moon has played a huge role in the development of Earth. It stabilizes the planet, tempered dramatic climate swings, and possibly even provided the tidal heating that might have led to the first life forms. So it’s natural we would want to find a similar Earth/Luna system somewhere else in the cosmos. But astronomers have been searching for one for years at this point to no avail. And a new paper from Emily Pass and her colleagues at MIT, Harvard, and the University of Chicago describes using the James Webb Space Telescope to track some of the most promising exomoon candidates - only to be foiled by the star they were orbiting.

The new Colibre cosmological simulation includes more critical detail than previous simulations. It also includes updated models of things like AGN feedback and star formation. The simulations also include a sonic component, giving the results a cinematic and information-rich flair.

Measuring the strength of gravity is extraordinarily difficult, and different experiments have always disagreed – but a new test is paving the way to finally understanding nature’s most enigmatic force