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A strange new kind of superconductivity has been uncovered in uranium ditelluride (UTe2), where electricity flows with zero resistance—but only under extremely strong magnetic fields that should normally destroy it. Even more surprising, the superconductivity disappears at first and then dramatically reappears at even higher fields, earning it the nickname the “Lazarus phase.”

Perovskite solar cells shouldn’t work as well as they do—but they do. Scientists have now discovered that defects inside the material actually help, creating networks that separate and guide electric charges efficiently. Using a novel imaging method, they revealed hidden structures acting like charge “highways.” This insight could unlock even more powerful, low-cost solar cells.

A new chip design from UC San Diego could make data centers far more energy-efficient by rethinking how power is converted for GPUs. By combining vibrating piezoelectric components with a clever circuit layout, the system overcomes limitations of traditional designs. The prototype achieved impressive efficiency and delivered much more power than previous attempts. Though not ready for widespread use yet, it points to a promising future for high-performance computing.

A new chip design from UC San Diego could make data centers far more energy-efficient by rethinking how power is converted for GPUs. By combining vibrating piezoelectric components with a clever circuit layout, the system overcomes limitations of traditional designs. The prototype achieved impressive efficiency and delivered much more power than previous attempts. Though not ready for widespread use yet, it points to a promising future for high-performance computing.

A mysterious glow of gamma rays at the center of the Milky Way has long hinted at dark matter, but the lack of similar signals in smaller dwarf galaxies has cast doubt on that idea. Now, researchers propose a bold twist: dark matter might not be a single particle at all, but a mix of two different types that must interact with each other to produce detectable signals.

A mysterious glow of gamma rays at the center of the Milky Way has long hinted at dark matter, but the lack of similar signals in smaller dwarf galaxies has cast doubt on that idea. Now, researchers propose a bold twist: dark matter might not be a single particle at all, but a mix of two different types that must interact with each other to produce detectable signals.

Physicists have shown how time can effectively be reversed for some quantum systems, which would allow for new ways to harvest energy

The incompleteness theorem is accepted as part of the mathematical canon today, but columnist Jacob Aron says it was a bombshell when Kurt Gödel first introduced it. Gödel’s seminal work directly contradicted one of the great minds of mathematics and limited the field forever

Two extremely precise experiments agree with a previously shocking measurement of just how big the proton is, which may help future searches for new particles

Every day they show up to work, with sweet declarations of love for Trump pouring from their lips, they are further reaffirming their decision to bind themselves to everything he does.  

The post MAHA Doctors Love Donald Trump first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

On August 19, 2022, astronomers using the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope (DKIST) on the Hawaiian island of Maui caught the fading remnants of a C-class solar flare. Their observations showed something unusual: very strong spectral fingerprints of calcium II H and hydrogen-epsilon lines. It was the first time these two light signatures were seen in great detail during a flare. According to computer models, those lines were stronger than expected and play a not well-understood role in how flares heat the solar atmosphere where they occur.

The first flyby images of the Moon captured by NASA’s Artemis II astronauts during their historic test flight reveal some regions no human has seen, including a rare in-space solar eclipse. Released Tuesday, astronauts captured the images April 6 during the mission’s seven-hour flyby of the lunar far side, showing humanity’s return to the Moon’s […]

Observing the Taurus Molecular Cloud, a research team led by Kyushu University has found that during the early growth period of a baby star, the protostellar disk blows magnetic flux 1,000 au in size and creates a giant, relatively warm ring. Describing these phenomena as a baby star’s “sneezes,” these expulsions of energy and gas help the star to properly develop.

Researchers who observed a murderous conflict unfolding in a once-unified group of wild chimpanzees say there are parallels with civil wars in human societies

It was a rough morning on Botany Pond. Two undocumented drakes invaded this morning, and I must have spent 45 minutes chasing them around with my squirt gun. They would leave (along with Armon, who always returns), but then come back again. When they are around they will harass Vashti, even driving her off the nest, and that’s not good.

Finally Armon and Vashti were left alone, but I don’t want the undocumented ducks coming back.  Also, when chasing the errant drakes away, I accidentally spooked the wood duck pair, who have taken off.  I was sad because I love them so much, and I hope they return. (They’re clearly not yet nesting.) Armon goes after invaders, but not with great vigor: he’s a bit of a wuss.

But now all is quiet, and we had an epochal event a few minutes ago: four of the five red-eared slider turtles we put into the pond last fall (retrieved before Botany Pond was renovated) showed up, and all were competing for space and sun on a small rock.  There are other rocks they could use, but they like the one below.  I suspect the fifth turtle wandered away from the Pond at some point. This is the first time I’ve been able to see more than three turtles.

I’m exhausted: duck tending is no picnic!

As always, an Aussie who wishes to remain anonymous sent me this link, and noted that New Zealand isn’t the only country in the Antipodes that tries to make science (again “Western science”) coequal with indigenous knowledge.  Clicking on the screenshot below will take you to the strategy developed by the Aussie government: the “Australian Marine Science Strategy 2026-2036”

It begins on p. 2 with a land acknowledgement:

. . continues with a mission statement on page 4:

The National Marine Science Strategy 2026–36 sets out the research and development needed to realise the socioeconomic opportunities and benefits that come from enabling a thriving ocean economy while effectively minimising, mitigating and adapting to the critical challenges facing Australia’s ocean and coasts over the coming decade. It recognises that responding to challenges such as climate change and extreme events, biodiversity collapse and competing ocean uses will not only help ensure a healthy ocean, conservation and national resilience, but also unlock new opportunities for sustainable industries and innovation that deliver long-term environmental and economic prosperity for Australia.

. . . and then sets out seven “national ambitions” for improving our knowledge of marine science, all of which (save one) involve conservation, mitigating climate change, and fostering marine “industries.” The exception is the very first ambition:

Embed First Nations knowledge, innovation and leadership in marine science to ensure sustainable and equitable marine policy and management.

Finally, after going through the ambitions, continuously paying homage to the “knowledge systems” of the First Nations people (i.e., the Aboriginal Australians and Melanesian Torres Strait islanders), the report gives its recommendations. Here’s the very first recommendation (p. 33):

Now there’s nothing wrong with ensuring that the two groups that constitute the First Nations People get equal opportunity to do science and contribute to science. And insofar that the indigenous people have produced knowledge that can be verified by modern science, by all means give them credit and fold that knowledge into modern science. But, as usual, they do more than that. First the program argues, again with a dearth of examples, that “We also have much to learn from the integration and application of Indigenous knowledge systems and Western knowledge systems.” (p. 28). How do they know that? Where are the improvements in marine biology that have already come from “indigenous knowledge systems”?

This is not science or technology, but a drive for scientific equity: making indigenous knowledge coequal with modern science. And that is not even politics, but the sacralization of the oppressed. As we’ve seen so many times before from Canada and New Zealand, it is virtue signaling on a national scale.

A woman with three different autoimmune conditions had all of them treated simultaneously by genetically modifying her immune cells to kill off the rogue ones causing problems

Most readers here (and I) are keen on getting a Democrat elected as President in 2028, and it would be nice as well if the Democrats took over both houses of Congress this fall.  And, indeed, with Trump’s ratings in the dumpster, that may well happen.  But Ruy Texiera is worried that that is not enough: he thinks the Democrats feel that they don’t have to do more than sit back and let Trump self-destruct.  His thesis in this Substack article (the last one in the five years the site has been going), is that the Democrats are jaded and have failed to learn the lessons of the last few years—lessons about what the public wants. This obtuseness, he says, will eventually come back to haunt them, and may even affect Democratic chances for victory in the next few years.

I recommend that you read this article: the message may sound old, but Teixeira expresses it in detail and writes extremely clearly.  The sub-message for Democrats is this: “Don’t let the ‘progressives’ take over the party!”

If you don’t know Teixeira. here’s from his Wikipedia bio (he seems to be pretty much of a centrist):

Ruy Teixeira born December 15, 1951) is an American political scientist and commentator. He is a senior fellow at the centre-right think tank American Enterprise Institute and co-founder and politics editor of the Substack newsletter The Liberal Patriot, along with John Halpin.

He is known for his work on political demography, particularly for the book The Emerging Democratic Majority (2002), which he co-wrote with John Judis. In it, they argue that the US Democratic Party is demographically destined to become a majority party in the early 21st century, a thesis that he later disavowed, citing the rise of the progressive movement in the United States.

. . . Since 2020, Teixeira has written critically about a leftward shift within the Democratic Party.  He has argued that the progressive movement in the United States is over and finished after the 2024 United States elections, positing that Democrats still do not realise it as of 2025.

Click the screenshot to read for free (it’s the lack of money that has apparently killed the site, but it’s too late to subscribe):

Last year he wrote a related piece about Democratic obtuseness, “Is our Democrats learning?“, which gets its ungrammatical title from a G. W. Bush query, “Is our children learning?”.

On to the present piece; my comments are flush left; Teixeira’s quotes are indented.

The problem 

Posing this question again in early spring 2026, it is my sad duty to inform you that our Democrats continue not to learn. If anything, they are increasingly adamant that such learning is not even necessary. Their mantra now might be, paraphrasing that old joke about the British: “No learning please, we’re Democrats.”

The proximate reasons for this complacency are not hard to discern. Trump and many of his administration’s actions are very unpopular and voters’ views on the economy, their most important issue, are dire. Consistent with these sentiments, Democrats did well in the 2025 elections, continue to clean up in special elections, and appear poised to have a very good election this coming November.

These favorable political winds have made it a great deal easier for Democrats to ignore the need for change. Surely the American people have now woken up, are rejecting Trump and Trumpism once and for all and will never be seduced by right populism again.

. . . Currently, the desire for change seems to be hovering around zero, as more and more Democrats have convinced themselves that their problems have essentially been solved. Here at The Liberal Patriot, we know all about that. Funding for our modest enterprise, always precarious, has now completely dried up. Our view that the party has neither solved its problems nor is even very close to doing so has tanked our appeal among partisan Democratic donors, even reform-oriented ones, who now tend to regard us with suspicion. A little heterodoxy is fine but there’s a limit! Hence: no money.

Teixiera then singles out five areas in which, he argues—convincingly—that Democrats haven’t learned. Immigration and trans rights are the most thorough areas he analyzes (though economics will be more decisive), but of course I can’t quote the whole piece. A bit of each:

The culture problem. This is a big one. The yawning gap between the cultural views of the Democratic Party, dominated by liberal professionals, and those of the median working class voter is screamingly obvious. One approach to this problem would be to actually change some of the Democratic Party positions that are so alienating to those voters.

Nah! That would be way too simple plus would create fights within our coalition plus…we’re on the right side of history aren’t we so why the hell would we change our correct, righteous positions? Democrats have instead chosen a different path, aptly summed up by Lauren Egan:

It didn’t take long after the 2024 election—in which their party lost the White House and the Senate—for Democratic leaders to identify the problem: The party had drifted too far to the left on social and cultural issues.

It also didn’t take them long to come up with a solution: simply to shut up about it…

The working-class and rural voter problem. This brings us to the Democrats’ working-class and rural voter problem, also screamingly obvious from long-term trends and the results of the 2024 election. Of course, Democrats take comfort from the copious evidence that many of these voters are now having second thoughts about their support for Trump and the GOP. This can be seen both in low Trump approval and future Republican voting intentions relative to those voters’ 2024 levels of Trump support.

But there is little evidence that declining enthusiasm for Trump has been matched by increased enthusiasm for the Democrats among these voters. Indeed, a careful recent study by Jared Abbott and Joan C. Williams for the invaluable Center for Working-Class Politics finds that “waverers”—those Trump supporters who now say they are not planning to vote Republican in 2028—are overwhelmingly not supporting the Democrats but rather supporting neither party or generally disengaging from politics.

The trans “rights” problem. Every once in a while, some Democratic politician ventures a mild dissent from the trans activist agenda. Without exception, they are met with a brick wall of intense intra-party opposition which typically results in a hasty retreat by said politician. It is truly a litmus test issue.

This is remarkable. Perhaps nothing would surprise a Democratic time traveler from the 20th century as much as the incorporation of transgender “rights” into the Democrats’ 21st century project. Going far beyond basic civil rights in housing, employment, and marriage, Democrats have uncritically embraced the ideological agenda of trans activists who believe gender identity trumps biological sex, and that therefore, for example, transwomen—trans-identified males—are literally women and must be able to access all women’s spaces and opportunities: sports, changing rooms, bathrooms, jails, crisis centers, institutions, etc. . . .

. . . . In reality, sex is a binary; males cannot become females and females cannot become males. Transwomen are not women. They are males who choose to identify as women and may dress, act, and be medically treated so they resemble their biological sex less. But that does not make them women. It makes them males who choose a different lifestyle.

As noted, the remarkably radical approach of trans activists and gender ideologues has been met with little resistance in the Democratic Party. But as evidence mounts that the medicalization of children is not a benign and life-saving approach, but rather a life-changing treatment with many negative effects, and voters stubbornly refuse to endorse the idea that biological sex is just a technicality and more and more strongly oppose the trans activist agenda, Democrats’ identification with gender ideology has become a massive political liability.

Indeed, for many, many voters the Democrats’ embrace of radical transgender ideology and its associated policy agenda has become the most potent exemplar of Democrats’ lack of connection to the real world of ordinary Americans. For these voters, Democrats have definitely strayed into “who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes” territory. And if they’re not realistic about something as fundamental as human biology, why should they be trusted about anything else?

Of course trans people deserve those “basic civil rights,” but the clash among the Left is about the “ideological agenda of trans activists.”  I am not aware of any Democratic politican being asked outright by the press, “Do you think that trans women are actually women, and should, for example, be able to compete in women’s sports or be confined in women’s jails?” The press is not doing its job here; after all, part of its duty is to make Americans aware of where their politicians stand. But the mainstream media, being pretty “progressive” itself, is loath to even pose these questions.

Here’s another example of where the press has failed to do its job:

The immigration problem. The immigration issue has been a total disaster for the Democrats. They encouraged mass immigration through lax border and interior enforcement and porous asylum systems that effectively legalized illegal immigration and made a mockery of controlled, legal immigration. Over time, the intense unpopularity of these policies has contributed hugely to tanking Democrats’ working-class support. But to this day where are the Democratic politicians who are willing to unapologetically proclaim the following fundamentals of a realistic immigration policy?

There follows a list of ten reasonable propositions about immigration that no Democrat will touch.  Teixeira rightly sees the Democrats as effectly espousing an “open border” policy, with the possible exception of immigrants who have committed crimes in their home country or have done so after illegal entry into America.

But so far what has happened? Clearly Democrats are much happier denouncing ICE (including calling for its abolition) and Trump than they are grappling with the immigration issue and making clear, unambiguous commitments to radical reform. Noah Smith rightly sums up the situation:

I have seen zero evidence that progressives have reckoned with their immigration failures of 2021-23. I have not seen any progressive or prominent Democrat articulate a firm set of principles on the issue of who should be allowed into the country and who should be kicked out.

This was not always the case. Bill Clinton had no problem differentiating between legal and illegal immigration in 1995, and declaring that America had a right to kick out people who come illegally.

I have seen no equivalent expression of principle [JAC: remember, he’s talking about the Democrats] during the second Trump presidency. Every Democrat and progressive thinker can articulate a principled opposition to the brutality and excesses of ICE and to the racism that animates Trump’s immigration policy. But when it comes to the question of whether illegal immigration itself should be punished with deportation, Democrats and progressives alike lapse into an uncomfortable silence.

Every Democratic policy proposal I’ve seen calls to refocus immigration enforcement on those who commit crimes other than crossing the border illegally. But what about those who commit no such crime? If someone who crosses illegally and then lives peacefully and otherwise lawfully in America should be protected from deportation, how is the right-wing charge of “open borders” a false one?

Why can’t a reporter ask Elizabeth Warren or AOC this question: “Do you favor unrestricted immigration into America, and, if not, who would you exempt?”

And a big problem that’s only going to get worse:

The economic program (or lack thereof) problem. Democrats seem to think that the well-documented discontent with the Trump administration’s economic management now makes the economy “their” issue. In a thermostatic, opposition party sense that may be true, but it remains the case that Democrats do not have an advantage over Republicans on handling the economy.

This makes sense since voters viewed the previous Democratic administration quite negatively on economic management. They may not like what Trump has done, but they have not forgotten what Democrats did.

And let’s face it: the current Democratic economic program is quite thin; voters can reasonably question whether Democratic plans for the economy would be much of an improvement over what the previous Democratic administration delivered. Take energy.

. . . Rounding out the hit parade of Democratic economic policy ideas is that old favorite, “tax the rich.” There are now several versions in circulation whose policy defects we will pass over in charitable silence. But if this is what now passes for an innovative Democratic economic policy idea, they are perhaps in more trouble than I thought.

Feel free to agree or disagree below, but I recommend reading the whole article. I’m not only worried about the Democratic prospects in the next two years, but also about whether if Democrats do get in, it will be “progressive” Democrats or disguised progressives like Kamala Harris.

Here are Teixeira’s last words ever on this website:

Looking over this list of problems, one thing that stands out to me is that Democrats have never come to terms with how profoundly mistaken many of their priorities have been. These haven’t just been minor errors in implementing an otherwise fine program. Much of the program was simply wrong and, arguably, not even progressive.

It’s time—past time—for Democrats to discard the conceit that they are on the right side of history and that therefore their positions are, and have been, noble and correct. Until they do so, I do not expect them to develop the dominant majority coalition they seek and vanquish right populism. Indeed, it could be the other way around. That’s a sobering thought.

I’m not as pessimistic as Teixeira, but it’s time for liberals to speak out against illiberalism in their party, and demand that their candidates listen to their constituents.

Earth’s nights are steadily getting brighter overall, but the changes vary dramatically by region. Rapid urban growth is lighting up countries like China and India, while parts of Europe are dimming due to energy-saving efforts and new lighting technologies. The most detailed satellite analysis yet shows these shifts happening faster and more unevenly than expected. Even global trends can mask sharp local contrasts, from war-related blackouts to deliberate reductions in light pollution.

Reading the Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson brings the benefits and pitfalls of efforts to terraform the Red Planet into sharp relief. Since the 1970s, when Carl Sagan first suggested the possibility that we could make Mars more Earth-like, that process has been a staple of science fiction. But there’s always been a significant amount of humanity that thinks we shouldn’t. A new paper available in pre-print on arXiv from Edwin Kite of the University of Chicago and his co-authors skirts around the ethical and moral questions of whether we should and tries to take a long hard look at whether we can.