News Feeds

Today we have some travel and wildlife photos from reader Jan Malik.  Jan’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. (Don’t miss the Taiwan barbet!)

Here are a few pictures I took during my short stay in Taipei, Taiwan (Republic of China) in 2016. Business trips usually allow very little time for sightseeing — the familiar, morbid cycle of airport → hotel → conference room → hotel → airport — but on this occasion I had a few free hours in the afternoon. Naturally, I decided to explore the nearby Taipei Botanical Garden with a birding lens that mysteriously strayed into my suitcase:

On my way to the Botanical Garden, I visited the National Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Park and Hall, the latter built in the late 1970s after the President’s death. I include it here for documentary reasons — who knows how long it is going to survive, given the volatile political situation.

Inside stands a larger‑than‑life sculpture of the Generalissimo. Taiwan’s history is typical of right‑wing dictatorships which, like South Korea, Spain, or Portugal, began as oppressive authoritarian regimes and then evolved into genuine democracies. Conversely, left‑wing dictatorships typically resist fundamental change and persist until their eventual collapse:

Onward to wildlife. The entrance to the Mausoleum was guarded by a lion (Panthera leo var. lapideus):

Already in the Botanical Garden, I encountered a cat, doing what cats do best – contemplating:

In one of the alleys I came upon a sizable crowd — people were observing local celebrities, a pair of nesting Oriental magpie‑robins (Copsychus saularis). The birds seemed completely unfazed by the attention, the male singing and standing guard at the nest;

These birds are bold and well adapted to human habitats. The female does most of the feeding; here she brings an unidentified moth to her chicks in a rotted‑out branch stump:

At a nearby pond I spotted a duck. It was likely a domestic bird, possibly with a dash of wild Mallard  (Anas platyrhynchos) ancestry:

The pond was full of lotus plants, which provided excellent habitat for the Common moorhen (Gallinula chloropus). Like all rails, these birds have relatively small wings and strong feet, well suited to foraging on land as well as in water. They swim well despite lacking webbing between their toes. These traits help explain why, when rails successfully colonize remote predator‑free islands, they often evolve reduced flight or complete flightlessness;

Moving further along the park alleys, I spotted a Taiwan barbet (Psilopogon nuchalis) looking out of its nest cavity. As an endemic species, it was a special find for me. Barbets vary widely in sexual dimorphism — in the Taiwan barbet the sexes are practically indistinguishable, in others (like the Coppersmith barbet) the differences are subtle, and in still others (such as the Red‑and‑yellow barbet) they are striking. I wonder why, in this species, bright coloration in females is not maladaptive. Perhaps the fact that they are obligate cavity nesters shields incubating females from predators. The same logic applies to woodpeckers, whose sexes are also similar aside from modest red patches in males:

Shortly after the barbet, I hit another jackpot in my endemics count — the Taiwan blue magpie (Urocissa caerulea). Like other corvids, it is social and omnivorous, and like Taiwanese barbets, it is sexually monomorphic. Corvids also evolved cooperative breeding: fledglings often remain with their parents and help raise the next brood. This likely evolved through kin selection. Why does it work so well in corvids and not in most other birds? Perhaps in environments with limited resources, young birds have better reproductive success by helping relatives than by attempting to breed independently?:

Having spent some time observing the magpie, I moved on — my remaining time before the flight was getting short. Soon I saw another first for me, though a common sight in Southeast Asia: the light‑vented bulbul (Pycnonotus sinensis). An omnivorous bird, here it was about to snatch a ripe fig:

Moving on, I photographed a dragonfly, which I believe is a male Crimson Marsh Glider (Trithemis aurora). These insects are sexually dimorphic, with olive‑colored females. This male appears to be orienting its abdomen toward the sun to reduce the surface area exposed to solar radiation and prevent overheating — a behavior known as “obelisking”:

Near the Botanical Garden exit I saw the last animal in this series, the Eurasian tree sparrow (Passer montanus). They always bring a smile to my face. Unlike many other sparrows, the sexes are alike. In 1958 they were targeted during China’s “Four Pests” campaign, a fine example of how ideology can override basic biological understanding:

While driving toward the airport that evening, I saw a Buddhist temple by the roadside, adorned with a symbol that, in European cultural circles, evokes entirely non‑religious sentiments. It was adopted in the 1920s by the National‑Socialist German Workers’ Party, but in Asia it is an ancient religious emblem. It is not identical to the Hakenkreuz — it “rotates” counterclockwise — and its meaning here is entirely benign:

 

Researchers have uncovered friction without contact—driven entirely by magnetic interactions. As two magnetic layers slide, their internal forces compete, causing constant rearrangements that dramatically increase resistance at certain distances. This creates a surprising peak in friction instead of a steady rise, breaking a long-standing physics law.

Astronomers have uncovered surprising evidence of a thick atmosphere surrounding TOI-561 b, a scorching, fast-orbiting rocky planet once thought too extreme to hold onto any gas. Using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, researchers found the planet is far cooler than expected for a bare rock, hinting at a heat-distributing atmosphere above a churning magma ocean. This strange world—where a year lasts just over 10 hours and one side is locked in eternal daylight—may even be rich in volatile materials, behaving like a “wet lava ball.”

“A brain biased toward seeing meaning rather than randomness is one of our greatest assets. The price we pay is occasionally connecting dots that don’t really belong together.”1 –Rob Brotherton

For nearly a decade, a mysterious ailment known as “Havana Syndrome” has been portrayed as proof that American diplomats and intelligence officers have been attacked by a foreign adversary using a secret energy weapon. Few outlets have promoted this narrative more forcefully than the CBS television News Magazine 60 Minutes, which has presented the saga as a chilling geopolitical mystery. Yet after years of investigation, the U.S. intelligence community has concluded that such attacks are “highly unlikely.” So how did one of America’s most respected news programs become so invested in a story that the evidence increasingly contradicts? The answer tells us less about the shadowy world of spycraft and secret weapons, and more about the psychology of belief, the power of social contagion, and the media’s enduring fascination with invisible enemies. 

60 Minutes is widely regarded as one of the most prestigious and successful news programs in American television history. For decades it has been the gold standard in investigative reporting and has won every major award in broadcast journalism since its inception in 1968.2 Over the past decade the program has aired four exposés on “Havana Syndrome,” a mysterious clustering of health complaints first noticed by U.S. government officials in Havana, Cuba in 2016 (hence the name).3 However, for the past three years its reputation has been tarnished by two separate intelligence assessments that have challenged and discredited key elements of their investigations.4 

Immediately after their third report aired in March 2024, which claimed that an elite Russian military unit was targeting Americans with an energy weapon, the segment prompted calls for a renewed congressional investigation.5 Yet the CIA Director in the Biden Administration, William Burns, responded to the broadcast by issuing a firm assurance that the claims had been thoroughly investigated and were unfounded.6 This conclusion was reaffirmed in an updated intelligence assessment that was issued in 2025.7

On Sunday March 8, 2026, 60 Minutes aired its fourth investigation into “Havana Syndrome” in nine years, once again making dramatic claims that American spies, diplomats, and military personnel have been targeted by a mysterious weapon, first in Havana, and later around the world.8 The three previous segments were critiqued in the pages of Skeptic as they relied heavily on speculation with limited physical evidence, while largely excluding skeptical perspectives.9 The latest chapter in this saga is no different, repeating old, discredited claims and introducing a striking new allegation that the government purchased a Havana Syndrome-type device on the Russian black market.10

The “Attacks” on Chris and Heidi

In the latest segment, narrator Scott Pelley interviews Chris (last name withheld) who worked on top secret spy satellites near Washington DC, and claimed to have been attacked several times between August and December 2020. Pelley implies that Chris had been targeted with an energy weapon, describing him as having been “struck by an unseen force.” He said the first incident felt like someone punched him in the throat, his left ear was clogged, and a sharp pain shot down his left arm. During the second incident, in the kitchen of his Virginia home, he suddenly felt like a vice was squeezing his head, and he became disoriented, confused, and dizzy. A third episode occurred in his living room when he was stricken with a cramping of his back muscles “like a charley horse,” accompanied by a hot, sharp pain. In the final episode, he woke up feeling like a vice was gripping his brainstem and he experienced “a full body convulsion.” 

While the segment frames Chris’s experience as a targeted strike, his clinical presentation is consistent with common neurological and psychological conditions such as migraines and anxiety disorder. Migraines often cluster over several months and grow progressively worse before resolving. His description of vice-like pressure is commonly reported by migraine sufferers. Symptoms typically involve head pressure and pain, dizziness, confusion, disorientation, muscle spasms, and throat sensations. They often include unilateral symptoms (affecting one side of the body) such as the clogging of his left ear and the shooting pain down his left arm.  

That he experienced several distinct episodes with differing symptoms raises further questions about the likelihood of an attack. Why would the same weapon produce such different effects? Chris’s other symptoms such as throat tightness (globus) and muscle spasms that grew progressively worse, may reflect anxiety from someone who was working in an extreme stress environment (a classified spy satellite program). The least likely explanation for his symptoms is an attack by a directed energy weapon. 

The 60 Minutes narrative survives primarily through a strategic omission of key facts.

His partner Heidi described waking up with joint pain that was concentrated in her left shoulder. Pelley said that “bones in her shoulder were dissolving,” and she was diagnosed with osteolysis, which required an operation. The implication was that she too had been struck with the same mysterious weapon. But osteolysis of the shoulder is a well-known condition that is becoming increasingly diagnosed in women. It is associated with repetitive strain injuries, weightlifting, trauma, and inflammation, not mysterious external agents.11 Heidi’s shoulder condition is an entirely different pathology from that of Chris. It is far more probable that two people living together simply developed two unrelated conditions.  

Pelley then mentions several other victims who supposedly had similar symptoms: an FBI agent who experienced a drilling sensation in her right ear; a Commerce Department official who reported severe head pressure and ear pain; and the wife of an official who felt a piercing pain and pressure in her left ear and a headache. He asserts that a striking aspect of these stories is that “people who never met tell it the same way.” A more plausible explanation is that they were suffering from vestibular disorders: conditions that affect the inner ear and parts of the brain that regulate balance and spatial awareness. The symptoms described in the 60 Minutes interviews include ear pain and pressure, headaches and head pressure, and unusual sounds and sensations in the ear. The descriptions of the victims would be familiar to any vestibular neurologist treating migraines and inner ear conditions including unusual ear sensations, stabbing pains, or a perception of drilling, pulsation, or vibrations.12 It is estimated that one-third of adults over 40 will experience vestibular dysfunction.13

The Omission of Key Information

The 60 Minutes narrative survives primarily through a strategic omission of key facts. It fails to mention that the foundational studies in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that gave rise to the belief that a mysterious weapon had injured American personnel in Cuba, were mired in controversy. This included internal ethics complaints, the withdrawal of authors, and accusations of scientific misconduct. In doing so, the program presents a house of cards as a fortress of settled science. The first study appeared in JAMA in February 2018, and caused a sensation with claims that the patients suffered brain damage.14 Prior to its publication, UCLA neurologist Dr. Robert Baloh, who developed some of the tests that were used in the study, was asked by the editors to review the findings. He found the manuscript to be laden with inconsistencies, described the claims as “science fiction,” and recommended against acceptance.15

Three of the study’s original authors removed their names just prior to publication as they were refused access to the data or earlier revisions of the manuscript. One of them—Dr. Carey Balaban, an ear, nose and throat specialist at the University of Pittsburgh, was so disturbed by this that he filed an ethics complaint over what he described as potential scientific misconduct.16 When the study appeared, there were calls by neurologists for their methods to be clarified or the study retracted.17 A later attempt to clarify the study’s findings was described by University of Edinburgh neurologist Sergio Della Sala as incomprehensible.18 Prior to its publication, information had been leaked to the media that several of the patients suffered white matter tract changes in their brains, prompting dramatic headlines about brain damage. However, when the study appeared, the prevalence of white matter changes fell within a normal range.19 

A second JAMA study in 2019, was equally controversial. It found brain anomalies in a small group of victims, once again prompting sensational headlines about brain damage. The study’s lead author, Dr. Ragini Verma, even described the differences in brain images of “Havana Syndrome” victims and a control group as “jaw-dropping.”20 Yet such findings are common in small cohorts and are consistent with what one would expect to see in a group of people under prolonged stress. The authors even admitted that the anomalies were so minor that they could have been caused by individual variation.21 Another problem was that 12 of the Havana Syndrome patients had pre-existing histories of concussion compared to none in the control group. Despite this, many media outlets had a field day citing a few rogue scientists who proclaimed that it was clear evidence of an attack by a microwave weapon. 

Dubious Beginnings 

The 60 Minutes segment also failed to mention that social contagion may have played a role in the initial spread of “Havana Syndrome.” CIA analyst Fulton Armstrong would later reveal that the undercover intelligence agent in Havana who first reported the mysterious sounds and believed they were responsible for his health issues, had engaged in a vigorous campaign to persuade colleagues that the sounds were significant. “He was lobbying, if not coercing, people to report symptoms and connect the dots,” Armstrong said.22 The man, who has since been dubbed “patient zero,” later attended a gathering of embassy personnel and played the recording of his “attack,” encouraging them to report their symptoms as he was convinced that they too had been targeted. His recording was analyzed by government scientists and identified as crickets.23 In fact, eight of the first group of victims in Cuba who reported feeling unwell and hearing sounds, recorded their “attacks.” They were later identified as the mating call of the Indies short-tailed cricket.24

Soon American and Canadian diplomats stationed in Havana were on the lookout for strange sounds and health complaints. Eventually the U.S. government alerted all of its active military personnel and embassy staff around the world to be vigilant for mysterious sounds and “anomalous health incidents.” In response, there were over 1,500 reports of possible attacks. The problem with these alerts is that “Havana Syndrome” symptoms are common in the general population and include headaches, nausea, dizziness, forgetfulness, difficulty concentrating, tinnitus, fatigue, facial pressure, hearing loss, ear pain, trouble walking, depression, irritability, and even nose bleeds.

One study found that the average person experiences five different symptoms in any given week. Thirty-six percent noted fatigue; 35 percent reported headaches. Nearly 30 percent said they had insomnia, while 15 percent had difficulty concentrating, 13 percent reported memory problems; roughly 8 percent noted nausea and dizziness.25 These symptoms overlap with those attributed to “Havana Syndrome.” When one eliminates claims of brain damage and hearing loss (which were never demonstrated), one is left with an array of exceedingly common symptoms.

A Fixation on David Relman

The 60 Minutes segment includes extensive interviews with Stanford University microbiologist David Relman who headed two panels that both concluded that pulsed microwave radiation was likely involved in some cases. As with the earlier 60 Minutes investigations, the government intelligence assessments on “Havana Syndrome” have rejected his conclusions. One of Relman’s panels said it was not possible to assess the involvement of social contagion as there was no data on the early spread.26 Yet, the spread from “patient zero” to fellow spies and diplomats in Havana has been well-documented and was widely known over a year before the panel issued their findings in December 2020.27 The same panel interviewed fringe figures such as Dr. Beatrice Golomb, a researcher at the University of California, San Diego, known for her extreme views on mass psychogenic illness, which she believes does not exist.28 His 2022 panel concluded that social contagion could not have affected spies and diplomats operating in Havana because they were highly educated and trained to deal with stress.29 This is a common fallacy.30 These conclusions may not be surprising given that Relman’s panels failed to interview a single prominent skeptic.  

The enduring lesson of “Havana Syndrome” is not secret weapons but the psychology of belief.

Scott Pelley complains that the panels’ conclusions have been ignored by the intelligence community. Relman told Pelley that it was embarrassing and insulting that the victims have been “dismissed as malingerers or people who are manufacturing things.” Pelley concurred by saying that the American government “has doubted their stories” and they have been labelled as “delusional.” These claims are misleading. In 2023, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence stated unequivocally that it was the consensus of the intelligence community that the symptoms exhibited by “Havana Syndrome” sufferers are real, but it was “highly unlikely” the stimulus was a directed energy weapon from a foreign adversary. Instead, they attributed the complaints to an array of factors including pre-existing conditions, conventional illnesses, environmental causes, and social factors (a clear reference to mass suggestion and social contagion). The intelligence assessment explicitly states that their findings “do not call into question the very real experiences and symptoms that our colleagues and their family members have reported.”31 A second intelligence assessment issued in 2025 reached a similar conclusion,32 while a recent study by the National Institutes of Health found no evidence of brain damage.33  

The Portable Microwave Device

The 60 Minutes segment also reported that in 2024 undercover U.S. government agents obtained a portable microwave weapon from a Russian criminal network and have tested it on animals. They said that the Pentagon-funded mission to obtain the weapon cost about $15 million. For being the centerpiece of this story, they provide few details. Pelley said “Our confidential sources tell us the still classified weapon has been tested in a U.S. military lab for more than a year. Tests on rats and sheep show injuries consistent with those seen in humans.” The problem with this claim is that there is no credible evidence that the victims of “Havana Syndrome” were injured by a weapon. 60 Minutes didn’t break this story; that distinction goes to CNN, who this year reported on their investigation into the same device, but their perspective was in sharp contrast to the 60 Minutes claims. The CNN sources said there was an ongoing debate and skepticism over attempts to link the device to “Havana Syndrome.”34

The claims by 60 Minutes are based on anonymous sources rather than technical reports, there are no test results, and they did not even obtain a picture of the device! Even after the device was acquired, the updated assessment on “Havana Syndrome” that was published in 2025 continued to maintain that the involvement of an adversarial weapon was highly unlikely. The U.S. and foreign governments have long conducted research on potential new weapons, so the existence of the Russian device should come as no surprise. Yet there is a big difference between testing, and producing an effective, practical weapon, with a major impediment being the laws of physics. The details surrounding the device and who created it, are nebulous. For instance, how could a Russian criminal syndicate obtain such a highly classified device and offer it for sale on the black market, without the knowledge of Russian intelligence, or U.S. intelligence for that matter?  

A Media Zombie That Won’t Die

This is not the first claim of its kind. In February 2026, the Washington Post reported that a Norwegian government researcher had built a device that was purportedly behind the Havana Syndrome “attacks.”35 Unnamed sources claimed that after exposing himself to pulsed microwave radiation, he developed neurological symptoms consistent with the victims. The report stated that after the Norwegian government informed the CIA, officials from both the White House and Pentagon visited Norway on two occasions to learn more. However, the Norwegian government says they know nothing about it. An investigation by one of the country’s leading newspapers was unable to identify any such researcher, while a microwave expert at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trym Holter, said any such study would have required ethics approval and been carried out in a controlled fashion with test subjects. He said for someone to have conducted such an experiment on themselves would have been “completely crazy” and he questioned whether any such experiment had ever occurred.36

Perhaps the most troubling reason for this one-sided reporting is a glaring conflict of interest: the producers behind all four 60 Minutes segments, are marketing a book on the subject.

This pattern of credulous reporting is not limited to CBS News or the Post. Recently British journalist Nicky Woolf wrote a sensational article in the Sunday Times claiming that the evidence for a directed energy weapon is now overwhelming, while omitting the US intelligence community’s own conclusions to the contrary.37 He stated (falsely) that “many of the early cases didn’t know about each other,” and repeated the debunked claim that during the recent US raid in Venezuela, the American military used a directed energy weapon to incapacitate enemy soldiers.38

Historical Precedents

Unfortunately, 60 Minutes has repeatedly focused on one side of the story instead of presenting competing perspectives. A key problem when evaluating controversial claims is that once investigators become convinced that a hidden adversary exists, the belief itself can shape how evidence is interpreted. History is replete with examples. During the Salem witch-hunts of 1692, an idea spread that witches were attacking members of the community. Before long, over 200 residents were accused of consorting with the devil. During the “Red Scare” of the 1950s, a belief spread that communist sympathizers had infiltrated communities across the United States. In response, scores of innocent people were blacklisted, often on the flimsiest of evidence.

The enduring lesson of “Havana Syndrome” is not secret weapons but the psychology of belief. The producers at 60 Minutes continue to focus on exotic explanations while ignoring mundane ones. The colloquial term for this is “doubling down”—the stubborn persistence of clinging to a discredited hypothesis in the face of compelling evidence to the contrary. In the case of CBS News, it may be a subconscious attempt to avoid the embarrassment of having to correct the record after having been mistaken. The continued advocacy by David Relman and Scott Pelley for the microwave weapon hypothesis despite intelligence assessments to the contrary, exemplifies what psychologists refer to as “belief perseverance.” This is the well-documented tendency to maintain deeply held beliefs in the face of contrary evidence. 

Perhaps the most troubling reason for this one-sided reporting is a glaring conflict of interest: the producers behind all four 60 Minutes segments, are marketing a book on the subject. The Havana Syndrome: Secret Weapons, a Government cover-up, and the Greatest Spy Mystery of Our Time, is scheduled to be published this fall, with an introduction by none other than Scott Pelley himself.39 By continuing to air these “exposés,” CBS News is effectively providing a multi-million-dollar infomercial for a product that relies on a spy mystery narrative to drive sales. The authors say their reason for writing the book is “to tell the whole story” including “the cover-up.” This is ironic given that their reports have consistently left out key parts of the narrative.40  

Chasing Shadows

The history of science and journalism are replete with examples of how institutions can cling to persuasive stories long after the evidence begins to unravel. In the 1840s Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis produced strong empirical evidence that handwashing among midwives dramatically reduced the deaths of mothers from childbed fever, yet his findings were resisted for decades by the medical establishment.41 More recently, in the lead-up to the Iraq War many media outlets published erroneous stories that Saddam Hussein had obtained weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) even though United Nations weapons inspectors in the field insisted they had found no clear evidence.42 This led to an apology by The New York Times for publishing claims that were never independently verified, and the Washington Post acknowledging that skeptical stories were frequently “pushed to the back of the paper” while pro-WMD claims dominated the front pages.43

This pursuit of unicorns over horses is a cautionary tale of how fear, expectation, and sensational storytelling can create a phantom menace where there is no concrete evidence that one exists.

When investigators become convinced of the existence of a hidden adversary, ambiguous evidence can take on new meaning and be seen as patterns in a grand conspiracy. Anonymous sources become credible witnesses. Coincidences can appear to be coordinated acts of aggression, and mundane symptoms are redefined as signs of an attack. As physicist Richard Feynman famously warned: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”44  Throughout history, when a seductive explanation takes root—whether in the form of germs, hidden arsenals, or mysterious attacks—ambiguous signs are reinterpreted as confirmation rather than treated with skepticism. 

The promotion of ghostly enemies while omitting key facts is a dangerous game because it expends valuable resources at a time of confirmed threats to our homeland. This pursuit of unicorns over horses is a cautionary tale of how fear, expectation, and sensational storytelling can create a phantom menace where there is no concrete evidence that one exists.

Beliefs Have Consequences 

Unfounded beliefs and pseudoscientific ideas can have serious consequences by distorting scientific understanding, propagating myths, and shaping public policy.

Shortly after the airing of the 60 Minutes episode, the House Intelligence Committee met on March 19th with its chair, Republican Rick Crawford, asserting that the 2023 and 2025 assessments about that the involvement of an energy weapon was “highly unlikely,” were influenced by members of the Biden administration who have been covering up the ‘real’ cause – attacks by a foreign adversary.

National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard, FBI Director Kash Patel, and National Security Agency acting director William Hartman all agreed that there was an urgent need to retract the current assessment.

The last major hearing on ‘Havana Syndrome’ was conducted by the House Committee on Homeland Security on March 8, 2024. The hearing was titled: “Silent Weapons: Examining Foreign Anomalous Health Incidents Targeting Americans in the Homeland and Abroad.”

The title reflects the biased nature of the hearing. Not surprisingly, the witnesses were all supporters of the energy weapon hypothesis.

I was originally asked if I would be willing to testify at this hearing, only to be later told my testimony was no longer required.

Marie Mortreux, an assistant professor in the University of Rhode Island’s College of Health Sciences, is part of an international team of researchers studying how the Mars’s gravity would affect astronauts’ skeletal muscle.

Today we again have three items plus lagniappe, and I will keep on with Caturday posts for at least a month.

First, we have a four-minute video of Marvin the Cat getting a “rave bath”, whatever that is.  The YouTube notes give a link and a caption:

So I asked Grok what a “rave bath for a cat” is. The AI answer:

A “rave bath” is a fun, creative bath-time setup for a cat (specifically one that actually enjoys water—rare for most cats!) where the owner turns the bathtub into a glowing “party” atmosphere.

It comes from a popular 2024 viral video by The Dodo featuring a cat named Marvin, who is obsessed with baths. His owner came up with the idea to make bath time even more exciting:

• They turn down the lights in the bathroom to make it dark.
• They add glow sticks (the kind you crack and shake) floating in the water for Marvin to swat, chase, and play with.
• Sometimes they include a light layer of pet-safe bubble bath or bath bombs for extra splashing fun.

The result looks like a mini rave or underwater wonderland with colorful glowing lights reflecting in the tub. Marvin goes wild splashing around and clearly loves it.

The term “rave bath” stuck because of how the owner describes it in the video: “We came up with the cutest thing ever. It’s a rave bath… It’s like a Wonderland.” The video has millions of views across YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook, and people now sometimes use the phrase for any glow-stick-enhanced bath for water-loving pets.It’s basically the opposite of a normal stressful cat bath—pure pampering and play for cats like Marvin who beg for water time instead of running away from it. If your cat hates baths, this probably won’t convert them, but it’s adorable to watch! You can find the original video by searching “Woman Throws A ‘Rave Bath’ For Her Cat Who Loves Bath Time | The Dodo.” [JAC: note the disco music during the rave bath.]

This is a woman who loves her cats!

**********************

You should all know by now that Turkey is probably the most cat-loving country in the world. I’ve seen it for myself on several visits: one of the notable aspects is the groups of cats that congregate in outdoor restaurants, with the customers occasionally feeding them. Here’s a photo I took in March, 2008 in Istanbul:

From the Facebook site Fact Fuel: we learn that some Turks erect minature ladders to keep cats dry (and note the cat houses):

Winter in parts of Turkey can blanket cities in heavy snow, leaving stray cats searching for warmth along icy streets. In response, some apartment residents have installed small, cat-sized ladders leading from the ground up to their balconies. These narrow wooden or metal pathways are carefully secured against building walls, giving outdoor cats a safe route upward instead of forcing them to remain exposed to freezing temperatures below.

Once on the balcony, many residents place insulated boxes, blankets, or small shelters where the cats can curl up and rest. The ladders act as bridges between street life and temporary refuge, especially during storms. For animals accustomed to navigating rooftops and alleyways, the climb becomes a familiar path to safety.

The gesture reflects a cultural affection for street cats that runs deep in many Turkish communities. Rather than ignoring their presence, neighbors adapt their living spaces to include them. In the quiet snowfall of winter nights, these modest ladders stand as vertical lifelines — proving that compassion can be built step by step, right alongside everyday homes.

The ladders:

And if you click on the screenshot below you’ll go to an Instagram video:

***********************

And we return to the perennial problem described in this NYT column, which refers to a paper in the Anatomical Record by a team of Japanese authors (second secreenshot). You can access both sites by clicking on the titles (the NYT goes to an archived link).  The key is the way a cat’s spine is configured.

From the NYT article:

In a paper, published last month in the journal The Anatomical Record, researchers offered a novel take on falling felines. Their evidence suggests new insights into the so-called falling cat problem, particularly that cats have a very flexible segment of their spines that allows them to correct their orientation midair.

Greg Gbur, a physicist and cat-falling expert at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte who was not involved with the paper, said the study was the first he knew of that explored “what the structure of the cat’s spine tells us about how a cat turns over while falling.” He added that the research uncovered many remarkable details about how cats maneuver while falling.

People have been curious about falling cats perhaps as long as the animals have been living with humans, but the method to their acrobatic abilities remains enigmatic. Part of the difficulty is that the anatomy of the cat has not been studied in detail, explains Yasuo Higurashi, a physiologist at Yamaguchi University in Japan and lead author of the study.

“Physicists have tried to model the behavior in relatively simple equations,” said Ruslan Belyaev, a zoologist at the Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolution in Moscow who was not involved in the study. But, he added, “the real cat” is anything but simple.

Modern research has split the falling cat problem into two competing models.

The first, “legs in, legs out,” suggests that cats correct their falling trajectory by first extending their hind limbs before retracting them, using a sequential twist of their upper and then lower trunk to gain the proper posture while in free fall.

The second model, “tuck and turn,” suggests that cats turn their upper and lower bodies in simultaneous juxtaposed movements.

In the new study, Dr. Higurashi and his colleagues scrutinized different segments of cat spines using donated cadavers. They also conducted dropping experiments on a pair of live cats, from about three feet up.

But wait! There’s more:

The researchers found that the feline spine was extremely flexible in the upper thoracic vertebrae, but stiffer and heavier in the lower lumbar vertebrae. The discovery matches video evidence showing the cats first turn their front legs, and then their lower legs. The results suggest the cat quickly spins its flexible upper torso to face the ground, allowing it to see so that it can correctly twist the rest of its body to match.

They measured the spinal flexion in cat cadavers whose spines had been removed, and they twisted the removed spines until they “failed”. Here’s a figure from the paper:

(from the paper): (a) Schematic diagram of the testing apparatus used to twist a spinal region until failure. The rotary table was operated manually to rotate the caudal end of the spinal region counterclockwise relative to the immobilized cranial end at a quasi-static loading rate. Torque was measured using the transducer between the table and specimen. The rotation of both the table and specimen was filmed using a digital camcorder. (b) Torque-angular displacement curves obtained for Cat A, illustrating the mechanical properties measured in this study. Torque was recorded at every 5° of angular displacement. The neutral zone (NZ) was defined as the part of the curve with minimal resistance to vertebral rotation. The lumbar spine had no NZ. Stiffness was measured as the ratio of the change in torque to the change in angular displacement in the linear part of the curve. Max, maximum torque; ROM, range of motion.

“The thoracic spine of the cat can rotate like our neck,” Dr. Higurashi said.

Experiments on the spine show the upper vertebrae can twist an astounding 360 degrees, he says, which helps cats make these correcting movements with ease. The results are consistent with the “legs in, legs out” model, but definitively determining which model is correct will take more work, Dr. Higurashi says.

The results also yielded another discovery: Cats, like many animals, appear to have a right-side bias. One of the dropped cats corrected itself by turning to the right eight out of eight times, while the other turned right six out of eight times.

Here’s a figure from the paper showing the cats being dropped (onto soft pillows, mind you). Note that in (b) the anterior part of the cat rotates faster than the rear part,  This cat looks scared, with its tongue sticking out. The caption tells you what’s going on.

From the paper: (a) A representative frame sequence illustrating sequential rotation of the anterior and posterior trunk without counterrotation during air-righting. In this sequence, a cat rotates to the right. (1) The dorsal sides of both the anterior and posterior trunk are initially oriented downwards. (2) Upon release, the anterior trunk becomes oriented laterally, while the posterior trunk remains oriented downwards. (3) The anterior trunk is oriented upwards, indicating that its rotation has been completed, whereas the posterior trunk is oriented laterally. (4) The anterior and posterior trunk are both oriented upwards, indicating the completion of posterior trunk rotation. (b) Bar charts with individual data points showing the time required to complete anterior and posterior trunk rotation during air-righting for each of the two cats (Cats H and I). Error bars represent ±1 SD from the mean. The start of free fall was defined as time zero. Significant differences were assessed using paired Student’s t-tests. **p < 0.01.

If you want to see the paper, click below:

Here’s an enlightening video of how cats spin their bodies (front first) to land on their feet. It’s clearly instinctive, i.e., reflecting a behavioral-genetic program molded by natural selection:

********************

Lagniappe: Larry the 10 Downing Street cat has put out a video about what’s going on in his block. Most important, the Brits have decided to replace historical figures on their banknotes (they once included Darwin), with wildlife. Larry makes a strong case that he’s both wildlife and a historic figure!

 

Extra lagniappe: A CBS news report on the rescue of Biscuit, a stranded moggy:

And a third lagniappe item. This photo and caption arrived just half an hour ago from Robert Lang. His caption:

Yesterday I and some friends did a hike to a little-visited waterfall in the San Gabriels. At the trailhead, which is shared with some other popular trails, we met this person who was bringing his moggie along for their hike:’

h/t: Carl, Robert

James Blilie is back with some black-and-white photos from his perambulations and climbs.  Jim’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them. And Jim tells us he’s recovering well from a knee replacement.

Here is another set for your consideration:  Black and white landscape images from those I posted on that previously mentioned FB page for B&W images.

First up are two shots from our attempt to climb Mount McKinley (as it was named at the time) in May 1987.  We did not summit (“worst May weather since 1960-something”):

Rocky outcrop in the Kahiltna Glacier, scanned Tri-X Pan

Camp on the Kahiltna Glacier with the summit in the background, scanned Tri-X Pan:

Our local mountain, Mount Adams, but from the other side, the north side, 1987.  I climbed it three times, always from the north.  The “standard” route is on the south side.  Scanned Tri-X Pan:

Skiers in Garibaldi Provincial Park, British Columbia, 1988, scanned Kodachrome 64:

Dinner preparation, Nepal, 1991, scanned Tri-X Pan:

The Vietnam War Memorial, Washington, DC, January 1992, scanned Tri-X Pan

Letchworth State Park, New York, November 1992, scanned Tri-X Pan:

Elephants, Amboseli National Park, Kenya, 1991, scanned Kodachrome 64:

Bonneville Salt Flats, Nevada, June 2013:

Mount Hood, taken from our driveway, December 2023:

Kalaloch Beach, Olympic Peninsula, June 2025:

Equipment:

Current:

Olympus OM-D E-M5, micro-4/3 camera (crop factor = 2.0)
LUMIX G X Vario, 12-35MM, f/2.8 ASPH.  (24mm-70mm equivalent, my walk-around lens)
LUMIX 35-100mm  f/2.8 G Vario  (70-200mm equivalent)
LUMIX G Vario 7-14mm  f/4.0 ASPH  (14-28mm equivalent)
Leica DG Vario-Elmar 100-400mm, F4.0-6.3 II ASPH., Power O.I.S. (200mm-800mm equivalent)

The scanned images:

Pentax camera bodies:  LX, K-1000, ME-Super, MX
Various Pentax M-series and A-Series lenses:
20mm f/4
20mm f/2.8
50mm f/2.0
200mm f/4
Tokina ATX 80-200mm f/2.8

Qilimanjaro is selling a relatively cheap kit with everything you need for a quantum computer – you just need to be able to put it together

Scientists at Harvard have built a miniature device that can twist and tune light in real time. By rotating two stacked photonic crystals and adjusting their spacing with a tiny mechanical system, they can control how light’s “handedness” behaves. This allows the chip to distinguish between left- and right-circular polarized light with remarkable precision. The advance could lead to smarter sensors, faster communications, and new quantum technologies.

A routine quantum optics technique just revealed an extraordinary secret: entangled light can carry incredibly complex topological structures. Researchers found these hidden patterns reach up to 48 dimensions, offering a vast new “alphabet” for encoding quantum information. Unlike previous assumptions, this topology can emerge from a single property of light—orbital angular momentum.

A routine quantum optics technique just revealed an extraordinary secret: entangled light can carry incredibly complex topological structures. Researchers found these hidden patterns reach up to 48 dimensions, offering a vast new “alphabet” for encoding quantum information. Unlike previous assumptions, this topology can emerge from a single property of light—orbital angular momentum.

On Tuesday, CERN will transport antiprotons on a truck for the first time, testing the plan to deliver antimatter by road to research labs across Europe

In an incredibly lucky cosmic accident, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured a comet breaking apart in real time—something astronomers have long tried and failed to observe. The comet, C/2025 K1 (ATLAS), wasn’t even the original target, but when researchers pivoted to it, they unknowingly caught it mid-disintegration into multiple pieces.

You just established a settlement on an Earth-like planetary body far from our solar system. You did your evening chores after eating dinner, and you want to go out for the evening view, which consists of two setting stars, reminiscent of the infamous scene in Star Wars. However, there’s one major difference: a large planetary body is in the sky. As you were aware before arriving, you’re on an exomoon orbiting a Saturn-sized exoplanet, both of which orbits two stars.

Astronomers have found the first case of a brown dwarf binary pair experiencing mass transfer. The pair are very close to one another, with an orbital period of only 57 minutes. The pair will eventually merge into one, brighter star, or the accretor will become massive enough to trigger fusion. At only 1,000 light-years away, the system is a strong candidate for more detailed, follow-up observations.

Super-puff planets have extremely low densities, and exoplanet scientists aren't sure why. They seem to defy our understanding of how planets form. Researchers used the JWST to observe the atmosphere of Kepler-51d, one of the puffiest of the super-puffs. Unfortunately, even the powerful space telescope found a featureless spectrum. What does it mean?

Robert Trivers, who died on March 12, 2026, was arguably the most important evolutionary theorist since Darwin. He had a rare gift for seeing through the messy clutter of life and revealing the underlying logic beneath it. E. O. Wilson called him “one of the most influential and consistently correct theoretical evolutionary biologists of our time.” Steven Pinker described him as “one of the great thinkers in the history of Western thought.”

I was Robert’s graduate student at Rutgers from 2006 to 2014. Long before I knew him personally, however, he had already established himself as one of the most original and insightful scientists of the twentieth century. In an astonishing series of papers in the early 1970s, he changed forever our understanding of evolution and social behavior.

The first, published while he was still a graduate student at Harvard, confronted one of the deepest problems in evolutionary theory: how can natural selection favor cooperation between non-relatives?  In The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism Trivers proposed that cooperation could evolve when the same individuals interacted repeatedly, making it advantageous to help those who were likely to help in return while avoiding cheaters who took benefits without reciprocating — i.e.“you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.” The paper offered an elegant solution to the problem of how natural selection can “police the system” and has had enormous implications for human psychology, including our sense of justice, with parallels in other mammals such as capuchins and dogs.

From that insight flowed one of the most powerful and falsifiable ideas in modern science

The next year in 1972, Trivers published his most cited paper, Parental Investment and Sexual Selection. Here he offered a unified explanation for something that had puzzled biologists since Darwin. Writing perhaps the most famous sentence in all of evolutionary biology—“What governs the operation of sexual selection is the relative parental investment of the sexes in their offspring”—Trivers threw down the gauntlet and revealed a deceptively simple principle that reorganized the field. From that insight flowed one of the most powerful and falsifiable ideas in modern science: the sex that invests more in offspring will tend to be choosier about mates, while the sex that invests less will compete more intensely for access to them.

Two years later, in 1974, Robert once again gave birth to an entirely new field of study with Parent-Offspring Conflict.  In it, he built on William Hamilton’s theory of inclusive fitness to show that parents and children have divergent genetic interests. Because a parent is equally related to all of its offspring, while each offspring is related to itself more than to its siblings, conflict is built into the family from the beginning. With that insight, Trivers revealed that some of the most intimate and emotionally charged features of life—begging, weaning, sibling rivalry, tantrums, parental favoritism, even the distribution of love and attention within families—all could be understood as the product of natural selection acting on family members with conflicting evolutionary interests.

In other papers, Trivers made wide-ranging predictions about the conditions under which parents should produce or invest more in sons than daughters, how female mate choice can favor male traits that benefit daughters, why insect colonies are structured by conflicts over sex ratios, reproduction, and control, and how self-deception may have evolved as a way of more effectively deceiving others.

It is hardly an exaggeration to say that his ideas gave birth to the field of evolutionary psychology and the whole line of popular Darwinian books

Each of these papers spawned entirely new research fields, and many have dedicated their careers to unpacking and testing the implications of his ideas. As Harvard biologist David Haig put it, “I don’t know of any comparable set of papers. Most of my career has been based on exploring the implications of one of them.” Indeed, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that his ideas gave birth to the field of evolutionary psychology and the whole line of popular Darwinian books from Richard Dawkins and Robert Wright to David Buss and Steven Pinker. 

To know Robert personally, however, was to confront a more uneven and less orderly organism— to use one of his favorite words—than the one revealed in his papers. The man who explained the hidden order in life often struggled to impose order in his own. “Genius” is one of the most overused words in the language, with “asshole” not far behind, and I have known few people who truly deserved either label. Robert deserved both. He could be genuinely funny, extraordinarily generous, and breathtakingly perceptive, but also moody, childish, and needlessly cruel.

Bob and other committee members after my dissertation defense (2014) | Bob with undergraduate students (Jamaica, 2010)

Robert taught me that writing was endless revision and paying attention to the tiniest of details. He went through seven drafts of Parental Investment and Sexual Selection and frequently quoted Ernst Mayr telling him that papers are never finished, only abandoned. He used to call me “slovenly,” but more than once returned a draft of mine with a piece of his own dried lettuce stuck to it.

He was like an alien visiting our planet trying to make sense of our strange habits

He had an uncanny ability to see the obvious. I used to joke that one reason he was so good at explaining behaviors the rest of us took for granted was that he was like an alien visiting our planet trying to make sense of our strange habits—why we invest in our children, why we are nice to our friends, why we lie to ourselves. He told me that conflict with his own father was part of the inspiration for parent-offspring conflict and one of the observations that led to his insight into parental investment came from watching male pigeons jockeying for position on a railing outside his apartment window in Cambridge.

He cared more about truth than about his reputation

Robert also had a respect for evidence and for correcting mistakes that I’ve rarely seen among academics, a group not known for their humility. He cared more about truth than about his reputation and retracted papers at great cost to himself and his career when he thought there were errors. He also knew that he was standing on the shoulders of the giants who had come before him. He wrote that “the scales fell from his eyes,” crediting Bateman’s 1948 Heredity paper on fruit flies showing that males differ more than females in reproductive success for his insights into why males compete more for mates and females tend to be choosier, and he acknowledged that George Williams had already anticipated the importance of sex-role-reversed species in Parental Investment and Sexual Selection. Indeed he once described most of his insights into social behavior as those of W.D. Hamilton plus fractions.

He was a lifelong learner with a willingness to do hard things. After his astonishing early success, he could have done what many academics do: stay in his lane, guard his territory, and spend the rest of his career commenting on ideas he had already had. Instead, in the early 1990s he saw that genetics mattered and spent the next fifteen years trying to master it. The result was Genes in Conflict, the 2006 book he wrote with Austin Burt, which pushed his interest in conflict down to the level of selfish genetic elements. Few scientists, after making contributions as important as he had, would have had the curiosity, humility, and stamina to begin again in an entirely new area.

He liked to say, ‘I might be ignorant, but I ain’t gonna be for long.’

Trivers was a great teacher, though not always in the ways he intended. He often asked dumb questions—’What does cytosine bind to again?’ in the middle of a genetics seminar and made obvious observations—’Did you know that running the air-conditioner in the car uses gas?’ But as he liked to say, ‘I might be ignorant, but I ain’t gonna be for long.’

He could also be volatile and aggressive and there were many times when he threatened to kick my ass. I may have been the only graduate student who ever had to wonder whether he could take his advisor in a fight. Once, over lunch at Rutgers, I asked about a cut on his thumb after he had returned from one of his frequent trips to Jamaica. He matter-of-factly told me that he had just survived a home invasion in which two men armed with machetes held him hostage. He escaped by jumping from a second-story window, rolling downhill, and stabbing both men with the eight-inch knife he carried everywhere he went. He was 67 at the time.

Bob, evolutionary biologist Virpi Lummaa, me (Robert Lynch). Finland, January 2020.

The benefits of being Trivers’s only graduate student were obvious. He was a brilliant man and nobody else could speak with such clarity about the impact of operational sex ratios on parental investment and male mortality while rolling a joint. The costs were obvious too. He could be erratic and often seemed either indifferent to, or unaware of, the social consequences of what he said. This often left him professionally isolated and left me with few academic relationships I could count on when it came time to find a job.

The mark of a great person is someone who never reminds us of anyone else

One of the last times I spoke with Robert, a fall had left his right arm nearly useless. He described it as “two sausages connected by an elbow.” He was a chaotic and deeply imperfect man, but also one of the few people whose ideas permanently changed how we understand evolution, animal behavior, and ourselves. Steven Pinker wrote that “it would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that [Trivers] provided a scientific explanation for the human condition: the intricately complicated and endlessly fascinating relationships that bind us to one another.”  That seems just about right to me.

His ideas are some of the deepest insights we have into human nature, animal behavior, and our place in the web of life. The mark of a great person is someone who never reminds us of anyone else. I have never known anyone like him.

I’ll miss you, Robert. You asshole.

Bob rolling a joint in NYC, 2012.

Robert Ludlow “Bob” Trivers, one of the most consequential evolutionary biologists of the twentieth century, died on March 12, 2026, at the age of 83. In an extraordinary burst of intellectual creativity between 1971 and 1974, he published four papers that permanently altered how evolutionary biologists—and eventually the public—understood cooperation, conflict, selfishness, and deception in the natural world. These papers presented original theories of reciprocal altruism (1971), parental investment and sexual selection (1972), facultative sex ratio adjustment (1973), and parent-offspring conflict (1974). Each paper addressed a deep puzzle in evolutionary theory; together they laid much of the foundation for what would become the field of sociobiology and, later, evolutionary psychology.

His paper on parental investment and sexual selection (1972) proposed that the sex which invests more in offspring becomes the choosier mate. This theory explained with elegant simplicity why males and females so often behave differently across the animal kingdom. The paper arose from watching male and female pigeons out the window of his third-floor apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a reminder that transformative science can begin with simple, careful observation.

Robert Trivers (photo courtesy of Alelia Trivers Doctor) | A younger Robert Trivers

He was also among the first to explain self-deception as an adaptive evolutionary strategy, first describing the concept in 1976—arguing that we deceive ourselves in order to deceive others more convincingly, a counterintuitive idea that has since attracted enormous attention across psychology, philosophy, and the social sciences.

Robert’s books included Social Evolution (1985), widely praised as among the clearest accounts of sociobiological theory, Natural Selection and Social Theory (2002), a collection of his early influential papers outlined above, Genes in Conflict (with Austin Burt, 2006), which makes the central argument that genomes are not harmonious but instead sites of constant struggle, and The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life (2011), which brought his ideas about self-deception to a popular audience. He also chose to be the author of his own story in his memoir, Wild Life (2015).

Robert Trivers was born on February 19, 1943, in Washington, D.C., the son of Howard Trivers, an American diplomat, and renowned poet, Mildred Raynolds Trivers. Growing up in a diplomatic household, Robert attended schools in Washington, D.C., Copenhagen, and Berlin before enrolling at Phillips Academy and later Harvard, where he initially studied American history before making an important pivot to biology.

He studied evolutionary theory with Ernst Mayr and William Drury at Harvard from 1968 to 1972, earning his PhD in biology. While a graduate student at Harvard, Robert accompanied Ernest Williams on an expedition to study the green lizard in Jamaica's countryside. Robert met his first wife, Lorna Staple, in Jamaica; he fell in love with her and the island at the same time. Robert and Lorna wed in 1974 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and they had four children together: a son, Jonny, twin girls, Natasha and Natalia, and another daughter, Alelia.

Robert was on the faculty at Harvard University from 1973 to 1978, then moved to the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he remained until 1994, before joining the faculty at Rutgers University. Robert was named one of the greatest scientists and thinkers of the 20th century by TIME magazine in 1999. In 2008–09 he was a Fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study. He was awarded the 2007 Crafoord Prize in Biosciences by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for his fundamental analysis of social evolution, conflict, and cooperation—widely considered the highest honor in evolutionary biology and a prize often mentioned alongside the Nobel in scientific prestige.

His life outside the laboratory was as unconventional as his science. Robert met Huey P. Newton, Chairman of the Black Panther Party, in 1978, when Newton applied from prison to do a reading course with Robert as part of a graduate degree at UC Santa Cruz. The two became close friends and Robert joined the Black Panther Party in 1979. He and Newton later co-authored an analysis of the role of self-deception in the 1982 crash of Air Florida Flight 90.

After Robert and Lorna divorced in 1988, Robert maintained a close relationship with her and with the whole Staple family in Jamaica. He also built a home in Southfield, St. Elizabeth, and spent several months a year in Jamaica for decades. His favorite pastime at his home in Jamaica was to sit on the front veranda and observe the wildlife around him, often joking that the same group of animals would pull up a chair each evening and join him for a glass of red wine, marveling with him at the beauty of the sunset. He made lifelong friends in Jamaica and conducted research from the island on lizards, symmetry, and honor killings over the years. Robert married his second wife, Debra Dixon, in 1997 and they had one child together, a son—Aubrey. They divorced in 2004 but also remained friends until his passing.

Robert Trivers with his five children | With grandson, Lucas Malcolm Howard | With ex-wife Debra, stepson, Diego, and son Aubrey | With three children and seven grandchildren | With grandaughter, Jonisha, and his great grandson, Masiah

Robert Trivers was, by any measure, a complicated man. He was diagnosed first with schizophrenia at the age of 21 and that diagnosis was modified to bipolar disorder later in adulthood. He could be generous and brilliant in one breath, reckless and destructive in the next. But he was always a loving father, a dynamic teacher, and a caring friend, often listening to loved ones for hours and providing valuable guidance and needed moments of levity. He loved life with tenacity—both studying it and living it.

Towards the end of his life, Robert found the greatest joy spending time with his children, grandchildren, and his great grandson, Masiah. His eyes would light up the moment he saw him.

Robert’s work throughout his life was also very important to him. He wanted to make a significant contribution to scientific thought in his lifetime. The theories Robert produced reshaped how we understand the deep logic of living things. His brilliant contributions to our collective understanding—and his family—are his legacy and will spur important scientific research for years to come.

He is survived by his siblings, Jonathan Trivers (Karen), Ruth Ann Mekitarian, Milly Palmer (David), Howard Trivers (Cathy), and brother-in-law, Souham Harati. Robert is predeceased by his parents, his brother, Aylmer Trivers, and sister, Kate Harati. He is also survived by five children: Jonathan Trivers (Carline), Natasha Trivers Howard (Jonathan), Natalia Barnes (Jovan), Alelia Trivers Doctor, and Aubrey Trivers; ten grandchildren; and one great grandson.

Astronomers have found a 710-metre-wide asteroid that spins once every 1.9 minutes, so fast that it should have spun itself apart

Over at The Philosopher’s Magazine, Alex Byrne (a professor at MIT who works in part on gender and sex), has written a tale of rejection that’s both amusing (in how it’s written) and depressing (in what it says).

Alex was invited to write a book review for Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, an online site that publishes only reviews of philosophy books. Because reviews are invited (sometimes after a prospective reviewer offers to write one), they are rarely if ever rejected.

But not so with Byrne. Because he wrote a critical but not nasty review of a book on gender by a trans-identified male, Alex’s contribution was rejected—without the site even giving him an explanation.

Click the screenshot below to read Alex’s sad tale. Actually, it’s not really sad because his review will be published elsewhere, and this rejection does him no profesional damage.  But the way he was treated reflects yet another academic taboo like the one I discussed in the last post. In this case, the taboo involves saying anything critical about gender science or, in this case, philosophy, particularly about a book written by a trans person.

Some excerpts:

last October, I saw that Rach Cosker-Rowland’s Gender Identity: What It Is and Why It Matters had just come out with Oxford University Press. “Philosophically powerful,” “excellent, important, and timely,” and “fascinating, well-argued,” according to blurbs from well-known philosophers who work in this area. Timely, for sure. I thought reviewing Cosker-Rowland’s effort myself would be worthwhile, since I’ve written extensively on gender identity, in my 2023 book Trouble with Gender and other places.

Many readers will be aware that the topic of sex and gender has not showcased philosophers on their best behavior. It is almost ten years since Rebecca Tuvel was dogpiled by colleagues for writing about transracialism, and—incredibly—things went downhill from there. Dissenters from mainstream thought in feminist philosophy have been subjected to name-calling, no-platforming and other extraordinarily unprofessional tactics. As a minor player in this drama, I have had OUP renege on a contracted book and an invited OUP handbook chapter on pronouns rejected. My recent involvement in the Health and Human Services review of treatment for pediatric gender dysphoria has done little for my popularity among some philosophers.

I was not hopeful, then, that an invitation to review Cosker-Rowland’s book would spontaneously arrive. But NDPR welcomes “proposals for reviews from suitably qualified reviewers” (see above), and I had reviewed three times for them before. So, I emailed the managing editor in October. I was pleasantly surprised when Kirsten Anderson wrote back to me in December, “Good news! After consulting with the board about it, we’ve decided to move forward with your review.” OUP and NDPR were keen to get the book to me—I received a hard copy from both, and OUP also sent a digital version.

By mid-January I had finished, and sent the review to Anderson with the following note:

Review attached. It’s a big and complicated book but mindful of your guidelines I tried to keep the main text as short as I could—it’s a little over 2200 words. However, the review is very critical, and (again mindful of your guidelines) I need to give reasons for the negative evaluation, so I put a lot of the supporting evidence in the lengthy endnotes.

To which she replied:

Thanks for the review and the extra explanation! Your review will now go through the standard process, starting with being vetted by a board member covering the relevant area. If the length is a problem, I’ll let the board member weigh in along with any other revision requests that may arise. Otherwise, it’ll go straight to copyediting. After that, it’ll be published.

As I said, Alex’s review was not nasty but it was critical (there’s a link below), and he found a number of simple errors that Cosker-Rowland made. Here’s one:

I kept it clean and the overall tone was well within the Overton window for philosophy book reviews, which (as noted at the beginning) is wide. Terrible arguments in philosophy are common; more remarkable was Gender Identity’s slapdash scholarship and glaring factual mistakes. Here’s one example (from the review’s lengthy endnotes):

Gender Identity would have greatly benefited from fact checking. One particularly egregious error is the allegation that “in March 2023 there was a rally outside the Victorian Parliament in Melbourne at which neo-Nazis and gender critical feminists campaigned against trans rights and held up banners proclaiming that trans women are perverts and paedophiles” (158). The two groups did not campaign together and the feminists held up no such banners. The feminists’ rally, including banners and placards, can be seen in one of Cosker-Rowland’s own citations, Keen 2023. Cosker-Rowland even manages to misdescribe the neo-Nazis: their sole banner read “Destroy Paedo Freaks” (Deeming v Pesutto 2024: para. 100); although hardly well-disposed towards transgender people, whether the neo-Nazis meant to accuse them of pedophilia is not clear (para. 114).

I documented some other obvious errors and scholarly lapses in the review—by no means all the ones I noticed. “OUP should note,” I wrote, “that quality control in this area of philosophy is not working.”

Let’s reflect on Cosker-Rowland’s claim about the Melbourne rally for a moment. As a footnote in Gender Identity confirms, she knows that the gender-critical philosopher Holly Lawford-Smith was at the event. Cosker-Rowland believes, then, that Lawford-Smith, a philosophy professor employed by Melbourne University and an OUP author, is happy to attend—indeed, speak at—a rally at which fellow-feminists joined forces with neo-Nazis, both holding grotesque banners about trans women and pedophilia. Perhaps Lawford-Smith waved one of these banners herself! No one with a minimal hold on reality would find this remotely credible. Even more astounding is how this managed to get by the OUP editor and multiple referees—it’s not buried in a footnote, but is in the main text.

He found other errors that he didn’t mention in the review but gives in this piece (you can see his entire review here, in Philosophy & Public Affairs). Here’s Byrne’s summing up given in the last two sentences of his review:

Back in the day, we knew what it was to be transsexual. Transsexuality’s contemporary descendant, being transgender, is decidedly more nebulous and deserves an explanation. Gender identity as Cosker-Rowland conceives of it is of no help, and neither is obstetrical paperwork.

Some weeks after submitting the review to Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, Byrne got a rejection that said only that the journal site was “not moving forward” with publication. No reasons were given. Alex wrote back to the editor asking if they would be so kind as to answer two questions:

1. Who was the board member who initially vetted my review? This is not blind reviewing, I take it. The board member knew who wrote the review. Seems only fair that I should know the identity of the board member. If the board member had reasonable concerns, then there should be no objection to making everything transparent.

2. What, exactly, was the reason why you have decided not to publish the review?

Well, reviewers aren’t always entitled to the names of those who vetted a review, but certainly reasons should be given for a rejection.  None were, except that one board member declined to vet Alex’s piece and the other “recommended strongly that it be rejected outright.” That was the only feedback he got. Byrne isn’t moaning about this, but his essay does have a serious point about the infection of the publication process in his field by ideology:

The philosophy profession has shown itself to be an institution of fragile integrity when put to the test. One can only hope spines will eventually stiffen, and academic law and order is restored. Meantime, we cannot solely rely on the fortitude of Philosophy & Public Affairs. I suggest that the Journal of Controversial Ideas starts publishing book reviews.

Amen!