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Chinese researchers have a new method to extract uranium from seawater twice as cheaply as previous technologies. Their success comes as China needs uranium to fuel its unprecedented nuclear expansion

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s "make America healthy again" is basically Lysenko 2.0. It's come to the NIH and is destroying the crown jewel of US biomedical research with ideology and cronyism.

The post Lysenkoism 2.0 and the dismantling of the NIH first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

It’s Sunday, and so we continue John Avise‘s weekly series, this one on dragonflies and damselflies of North America. John’s IDs and captions are indented, and you can click on the photos to enlarge them.

Dragonflies in North America, Part 4

This week I continue a series of posts on Dragonflies and Damselflies (taxonomic Order Odonata) that I’ve photographed in North America.  I’m going down my list of species in alphabetical order by common name.  Also shown is the state where I took each photo.

Mexican Amberwing, Perithemis intensa, young male (California):

Neon Skimmer, Libellula croceipennis, male (California):

Neon Skimmer, male, side view (California):

Neon Skimmer, female (California):

Red Rock Skimmer, Paltothemis lineatipes, male (California):

Red Saddlebags, Tramea onusta, male (California):

Red Saddlebags, another male (California):

Red-tailed Pennant, Brachymesia furcata, male (California):

Regal Darner, Coryphaeschna ingens (Florida):

Roseate Skimmer, female (Florida):

Roseate Skimmer, male, sideview (Florida):

Saffron-winged Meadowhawk, Sympetrum costiferum (Wisconsin):

Saffron-winged Meadowhawk, female (Wisconsin):

One year ago, our star erupted with almost apocalyptic force—unleashing the most violent solar assault in two decades. Dubbed the Gannon storm, it wasn't just another solar flare. Multiple coronal mass ejections collided and merged into a single devastating megastorm that slammed into Earth's protective shield. As our magnetosphere buckled the night skies exploded with spectacular auroral displays. The event even reached Mars with images from Curiosity sprinkled with streaks from charged particles.

Mars once flowed with water—then 3 billion years ago, it mysteriously disappeared. Where did these ancient Martian seas go? Did the Red Planet's collapsing magnetosphere allow solar winds to strip away its water into space or did the water sink into the Martian regolith, hiding from our view?NASA’s InSight mission may have cracked the case. Seismic waves from meteorite impacts revealed water layer lurking 5.4-8 kilometres below the surface.

ESA's Plato Mission just hit a major milestone: 24 of 26 high-tech cameras have now been mounted and will soon be ready to hunt. This isn't your average telescope; it’s a planet-spotting powerhouse designed to catch distant worlds passing in front of their stars. The clever camera arrangement creates a cosmic wide-angle lens, scanning a massive 5% of the entire sky in one go. No other planet-hunter comes close to this field of view.

This will be a quick trifecta as I’m on Duck Duty. First, from Street Art Utopia, three memorials to homeless cats. Click on the headline to read:

Text from site is indented, and photos without credits are uncredited on the site. Two of the photos come from Pinterest.

Homeless cats monument in Braunschweig, Germany:

“Katzenstele” in downtown Braunschweig, German by sculptor Siegfried Neuenhausen, a former professor at the Braunschweig University of Art. The cat monument has been drawing attention to stray cats in Braunschweig since 1981. It stands as a symbol of appreciating all the kitties in town who don’t have a loving roof over their heads.

From Pinterest:

From Pinterest:

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Smithsonian Magazine recounts evidence for the earliest known pet cats to arrive in the U.S. In fact, they were likely working cats on ships rather than “pets” as we think of them, but at least we know they were heading to the U.S., even if they didn’t arrive there. Thus the headline below (click to read) could be doubly misleading:

An excerpt (the original paper is cited below, and it appears that the cats ate more than just rodents!):

. . . . a new study is offering even more insight into the history of these four-legged felines. Researchers have discovered the remains of two house cats in a 466-year-old Spanish shipwreck near Florida, which are likely the earliest known cats in the United States. They describe their findings in a new paper published in the journal American Antiquity.

The remains were found among the wreckage of the Emanuel Point II, a Spanish ship that sank in September 1559 near what is now Pensacola, Florida. The vessel was one of 11 ships that had sailed north from Mexico during an expedition under the command of Tristán de Luna y Arellano.

The conquistador’s fleet was anchored near the Spanish settlement of Santa María de Ochuse when a hurricane swept through, causing six of the vessels to sink and another to be driven inland. Between 1992 and 2016, researchers discovered three of the expedition’s shipwrecks.

Divers have successfully recovered several artifacts from the ships, including fragments of jars that likely contained olive oil, wine or water. Additionally, they’ve discovered the remains of several critters, including cockroaches, rats and at least two domestic cats.

For the new study, scientists took a closer look at the feline remains, which belonged to one adult and one juvenile cat.

Though the cats may have been stowaways, they were likely brought onboard intentionally to help keep rodents at bay. Along the way, they probably also became chummy with the sailors.

Their friendliness with the crew seems to have paid off: Tests suggest the adult cat was mainly eating fish and meats like pork, poultry and beef. Although it may have hunted the occasional rat or mouse, a “significant proportion” of the cat’s diet came from other sources, the researchers write in the paper.

The sailors may have fed the cats because they were so effective at controlling pests that there were none left for them to eat. Or they may have tossed the cats lots of food scraps “out of affection,” the researchers write. Sailors often considered cats to be lucky—especially those with extra toes.

“Their primary role may have been as commensal ratters and mousers that kept the onboard rodent population in check,” the researchers write. “This does not, however, preclude the possibility that these cats were well-liked and cared for by the sailors.”

. . . The first cats to travel to the Americas may have sailed on Christopher Columbus’ ships, though the animals are not mentioned in the voyages’ records. Archaeologists have discovered cat remains in present-day Haiti, where Columbus landed in 1492. But since the explorer never set foot on the mainland of North America, the first cats likely arrived via other expeditions—like the one led by Luna y Arellano.

Ah! We don’t think these cats arrived in North America. Whence the headline?

Click below to read the original paper:

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This paper, from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (click below or find the pdf here) shows a convergence between the skull shapes of some cats and dog breeds, a convergence that in some cases is so profound that you might classify some skulls of domestic dogs and cats as being morphologically closer to each other than either is to its ancestor (the grey wolf and the Egyptian wildcat, respectively). Of course if you looked at the rest of the skeleton you’d know whether you were dealing with a cat or a d*g.

 

Some of the science. First, the wild condition:

Skull Shape Diversity in Domestic Cats and Dogs. As with dogs (PV = 0.013), domestic cats are extremely variable, ranging from highly dolichocephalic (long muzzles and narrow skulls) breeds like Siamese and Oriental Shorthairs to greatly brachycephalic (short faces and wide, rounded skulls) breeds like Persians and Burmese (PV = 0.01). Domestic cat and dog diversification are similar in a macroevolutionary context in that both are substantially more variable than their wild ancestors, wildcats (F. silvestris) (PV = 0.002, P < 0.0001, Table 1) and wolves (C. lupus) (PV = 0.002, P < 0.0001, Table 1); Figs. 1 and 2 and Table 1). Dogs are more variable than domestic cats (P < 0.043, Table 1); this result, however, does not parallel the ancestral condition as wolves are no more variable than wildcats (P < 0.66, Fig. 1 and Table 1).

and the convergence (my bolding):

Multilevel Skull Shape Convergence in Domestic Cats and Dogs. Despite their greatly different evolutionary origins, extremely brachycephalic dogs and cats have evolved to be remarkably similar in skull shape (Figs. 1, 2, and 4 and SI Appendix, Fig. S3). Brachycephalic cats like Persians have evolved short, broad skulls with an upward-angled palate that closely resembles the brachycephalic skulls of dog breeds like Pugs and Shih Tzus (Figs. 1, 2, and 4 and SI Appendix, Fig. S3). Strikingly, some Persians are more brachycephalic than any of the dogs, as indicated by their extreme position on PC1 (Fig. 2). Indeed, in some flat-faced Persians, the nasal bones are entirely absent (14, 15). Extremely brachycephalic cats and dogs are substantially closer to each other in morphological space (Procrustes shape distance: 0.13) than either group is to their respective ancestors, or than their ancestors are to each other (Procrustes shape distance from extremely brachycephalic cats to wildcats: 0.20; extremely brachycephalic dogs to wolves: 0.29; wildcats to wolves: 0.23; Table 2 and Dataset S1). A resampling procedure comprising 10,000 rounds confirmed a significant difference in the Procrustes distances. Specifically, the Procrustes distance of 0.13 between extremely brachycephalic cats and dogs is significantly smaller (P < 0.0001, Table 2 and Dataset S1) than the distance (0.20) between extremely brachycephalic cats and wild cats. Moreover, it is also significantly smaller than the distance between extremely brachycephalic dogs and wolves (P < 0.0001, Table 2 and Dataset S1), as well as the distance between wildcats and wolves (P < 0.0001, Table 2 and Dataset S1). In other words, selection for brachycephaly has eliminated much of the ancestral difference in skull shape between cats and dogs. Here’s one figure from the paper, showing that pugs and Persians (B and F; “brachycephalic”) are more similar to each other than either is to its ancestor: ‘ (From the paper) Evolutionary convergence of head shape in brachycephalic domestic dogs and cats, as illustrated by photographs and CT scans of canids (A–D) and felids (E–H). Although wolves (A and C) and wildcats (E and G) have very different skull shapes, some of their domestic descendants like Pugs (B and D) and Persians (F and H) have convergently evolved similar skull shapes (D and H) as a result of selection for similar phenotypes.

Not only that, but this convergence appears to have evolved multiple times independently within both groups, so, for example, dogs became brachycephalic several times, as did cats.

The lesson: was already learned by Darwin: “Breeders,” he wrote in On the Origin of the Species, “habitually speak of an animal’s organization as something quite plastic, which they can model almost as they please.” That’s because every character seems to have tons of variation to select on. In this way Darwin’s studies of animal breeding informed his theory of evolution by natural selection, for he realized that what is true in domestic animals must also be true in wild ones. That’s why The Origin begins with a chapter on the domestication of and selection on animals like pigeons.

The PNAS paper ends with this warning, though the “companion animals” bit is a bit grating on me (I’m old and have no problem with “pets”):

Implications for the Health of Companion Animals.

The extent of convergence between brachycephalic cats and dogs is seen in an additional, unfortunate, phenotypic aspect. Brachycephalic cat and dog breeds have predispositions to many health disorders, some shared between species. As a result of these afflictions, pressure is mounting to ban the breeding of extreme brachycephalic individuals. We can hope such measures succeed for the welfare of our household companions, even if it has the effect of reversing this remarkable case of convergent evolution. No pugs or Persians, please!

 

h/t: Barry,

 

Quickie with Bob: Fusion Rockets; News Items: Falling Space Debris, What Makes People Flourish, Pig Heart Xenografts, Chiropractic Stroke, Breathable Algae Drug Delivery; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: Faster Than Light Expansion, Autism Self-Diagnosis; Science or Fiction

After a huge amount of kerfuffle, we now have Esther and her six ducklings on the pond.  First, Esther and Mordecai foraging pre-reproduction, with the drake dabbling:

I was previously unable to show Esther’s nest nest as, for the first time in our experience, a hen nested on the ground, digging a shallow depression and laying what I thought were eleven eggs (actually, there were eight). She laid the last egg and began sitting on them on April 10. They hatched 26 days later, on May 6 (the median is about 28 days). But they don’t go to the water until the day after hatcing. It seems a lot longer than fo days! I sat by the pond all day on Water Day, and on their first full day of life (the 7th), and half a day yesterday (to protect them when the dreaded Plant Cages of Death were fixed).  One baby was found dead by the nest, and we lost one of the seven that went into the pond on the first night. But now we’re stable, I hope, at six.

Esther nested: on the ground under a tree. I became aware of it when a student named Will emailed me with this map (click to enlarge).

Here’s the site of her ground nest, under this tree (anybody know the species?)

Where she dug her nest,  It’s a good site for a ground-nesting duck, protected and hidden, but unfortunately right by a sidewalk where tons of people walk.  We immediately wanted this area to be protected.

The good people at facilities put a fence around the tree within a day. I was very grateful. The fence went around the tree except for a gap on the far side where she could walk out, though she could also swim out or fly in.

Facilities, smartly, did not put a sign on the fence lest people get curious and stick their heads in. Esther had to remain undisturbed for the nearly month of incubation.

The nest site (Esther is sitting where I’ve circled.

She would take a break from nesting for anywhere between 10 minutes to half an hour on about two of every three days. Every 15 minutes or so I looked out my window, which overlooks the pond, to see if she was in the pond, and if she was I’d run down and feed her. She was ravenous (incubating uses up considerable metabolic energy:  the temperature under her belly, where the eggs lie, is about 100° F), and she also needed a bath and a preen from sitting in the dirt. When she was off the nest, I snuck a picture of her eggs. I thought there were eleven, but I see only eight, which accounts, with the death of one outside the nest and the disappearance of another, with our present six ducklings.

This is not a great nest, and I suspect Esther is a first- or second-year hen, somewhat inexperienced. The nest should be lined with feathers she plucked from her breast, which we’ve seen in all other nests, but there are none here. The thing on the left by the cement is not an egg but a rock.

It was only when she was on the nest that I discovered how cryptic the coloration of mallard hens are. They in fact almost exactly match the color of the ground when it’s dappled with sunlight. Nobody ever noticed her after the fence was up unless I had to tell someone who was sticking their head into the fence.,  Here’s how cryptic she was sitting on her eggs. You can barely make out the white in her feathers.  This is all, of course, an adaptation to hide from predators or randy drakes.

A reveal:

She’s a bit more obvious here. She moved around, adjusting and turning the eggs so they were evenly incubated. I think they get a quarter-turn per day.

 

Mordecai rested patiently nearby for the whole month. He was elated at the rare times Esther came off the nest, and was by her side immediately. I couldn’t help anthropomorphize the situation, thinking he must be lonely, and wondering whether he knew what was to come. (Evolution is cleverer than you are!)

This is hatch day: May 6, 2025, the day they began coming out of the egg. This video was filmed by an undergrad, and my thanks to her.  You can see one wet duckling head underneath her; this individual must have hatched not long ago. There’s also a drier one, which hatched earlier. You can hear the undergrad say “Oh my God, oh my God”, her reaction to the fantastic end of the incubation process.  Remember that mallards are ground-nesters in nature, and she was behaving “normally.” But because all of our other ducks have incubated on safer window ledges, so we were tense for the whole months.

All day the next day, May 7, I sat on a bench near the next, protecting the fence around mother and babies from any disturbances and waiting till I knew they would hit the water. This photo was taken within a minute of their doing so. They know instinctively what to do when they enter the pond: follow the mother and SWIM. Yes, there are seven babies, and, sadly, one disappeared the first night. I couldn’t find a body despite searching the pond and the surrounding area for an hour. I think a predator got it.

Now that I can show the details of the incubation, I can put up more videos and photos of the family (Mordecai is still here, driving off intruding drakes). Stay tuned.

This old strip of Jesus and Mo has new life; it came to Patreon members and I’ll put it up ’cause it’s relevant. It’s called “Twitter”. The caption was “A Friday Flashback today, from 2012.” That was when Joseph Ratzinger was Pope Benedict XVI. 

The new Pope is all over the national news, not just the Chicago news, and I’m surprised given the waning power of Catholicism, it’s still the top news every day on NBC and occupies a good deal of the NYT’s front pages. At any rate, it looks as if Pope Leo is going to focus on the “peace and love” message, and will also show a lot more consideration for the poor. But he won’t relent, I think, on key parts of Catholic dogma, though I don’t think he’ll say that homosexual acts that are unconfessed will doom one to hell.

David Geier was in the drug business. What was he selling before the FDA stepped in?

The post David Geier, Mail Order Pharmacist first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

NASA's Perseverance Rover landed in Jezero Crater, an ancient impact crater that was probably filled with water for a long time. During its exploration, the rover has discovered volcanic rocks on the crater floor, but the original source hasn't been found. Now, a team of researchers thinks there's a composite volcano right on the edge of Jezero Crater. They identify a conical-shaped structure that rises about 2 km above the surrounding plains.

While intermittent fasting may be growing in popularity, relatively little is known about how it impacts our gut microbiome – for better or for worse

An AI leaderboard suggests the newest reasoning models used in chatbots are producing less accurate results because of higher hallucination rates. Experts say the problem is bigger than that

Some parts of the Moon are more interesting than others, especially when searching for future places for humans to land and work. There are also some parts of the Moon that we know less about than others, such as the Irregular Mare Patches (IMPs) that dot the landscape. We know very little about how they were formed, and what that might mean for the history of the Moon itself. A new mission, called the LUnar Geology Orbiter (LUGO), aims to collect more data on the IMPs and search for lava tubes that might serve as future homes to humanity.

We don't have to rely solely on the JWST to observe the Universe's oldest stars. Some of the oldest stars in the Universe reside in globular clusters, and the Milky Way has about 150 of them. How old exactly? New research has the answer.

Extreme weather events are the most dramatic consequence of climate change, but there are many smaller ways it disturbs our daily life

The new Pope Leo XIV can make history by at long last releasing the World War II archives of the Vatican Bank and expose one of the church’s darkest chapters.

The Catholic Church has a new leader—Pope Leo XIV—born in 1955 in Chicago, Robert Francis Prevost is the first American to head the church and serve as sovereign of the Vatican City State. Many Vatican watchers will be looking for early signs that Pope Leo XIV intends to continue the legacy of Pope Francis for reforming Vatican finances and for making the church a more transparent institution.

There is one immediate decision he could make that would set the tone for his papacy. Pope Leo could order the release of the World War II archives of the Vatican Bank, the repository with files that would answer lingering questions of how much the Catholic Church might have profited from wartime investments in Third Reich and Italian Fascist companies and if it acted as a postwar haven for looted Nazi funds. By solving one of last great mysteries about the Holocaust, Pope Leo would embrace long overdue historical transparency that had proved too much for even his reform-minded predecessor.

The Vatican is not only the world’s largest representative body of Christians, but also unique among religions since it is a sovereign state.

What is sealed inside the Vatican Bank archives is more than a curiosity for historians. The Vatican is not only the world’s largest representative body of Christians, but also unique among religions since it is a sovereign state. It declared itself neutral during World War II and after the war claimed it had never invested in Axis powers nor stored Nazi plunder.

In my 2015 history of the finances of the Vatican (God’s Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican), I relied on company archives from German and Italian insurers, Alliance and Generali, to show the Vatican Bank had invested in both firms during the war. The Vatican earned outsized profits when those insurers expropriated the cash values of the life insurance policies of Jews sent to the death camps. After the war, when relatives of those murdered in the Holocaust tried collecting on those life insurance policies, they were turned away since they could not produce death certificates.

When relatives of those murdered in the Holocaust tried collecting on life insurance policies, they were turned away.

How much profit did the Vatican earn from the cancelled life insurance policies of Jews killed at Nazi death camps? The answer is inside the Vatican Bank archives.

Also in the Vatican Bank wartime files is the answer to whether the bank hid more than $200 million in gold stolen from the national bank of Nazi-allied Croatia. According to a 1946 memo from a U.S. Treasury agent, the Vatican had either smuggled the stolen gold to Spain or Argentina through its “pipeline” or used that story as a “smokescreen to cover the fact that the treasure remains in its original repository [the Vatican].”

Photo by Karsten Winegeart

The Vatican has long resisted international pressure to open those wartime bank files. World Jewish Congress President Edgar Bronfman Sr. had convinced President Bill Clinton in 1996 that it was time for a campaign to recover Nazi-looted Jewish assets. Clinton ordered 11 U.S. agencies to review and release all Holocaust-era files and urged other countries and private organizations with relevant documents to do the same.

The Vatican refused to join 25 nations in collecting documents across Europe to create a comprehensive guide for historians.

The Vatican refused to join 25 nations in collecting documents across Europe to create a comprehensive guide for historians. At a 1997 London conference on looted Nazi gold, the Vatican was the only one of 42 countries that rejected requests for archival access. At a restitution conference in Washington the following year, it ignored Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s emotional plea, and it opted out of an ambitious plan by 44 countries to return Nazi-looted art and property, settle unpaid life insurance claims and reassert the call for public access to Holocaust-era archives.

Subsequent requests for opening the files by President Clinton and Jewish organizations went unanswered. Historians were meanwhile inundated with millions of declassified wartime documents from more than a dozen countries and only a handful of Jewish advocacy groups pressed the issue during the last years of John Paul II’s papacy and the eight years of Benedict XVI.

Pope Francis opened millions of the Church’s documents.

To his credit, in March 2020, Pope Francis opened millions of the church’s documents about its controversial wartime pope, Pius XII. That fulfilled in part a promise Pope Francis had made when he was the cardinal of Buenos Aires: “What you said about opening the archives relating to the Shoah [Holocaust] seems perfect to me. They should open them [the Holocaust files] and clarify everything. The objective has to be the truth.”

Photo by Ashwin Vaswani

And while Pope Francis was responsible for reforming a bank that had often served as an offshore haven for tax evaders and money launderers and frustrated six of his predecessors, he nevertheless kept the Vatican Bank files sealed.

Pope Leo XIV is the Vatican Bank’s sole shareholder. It has only a single branch located in a former Vatican dungeon.

Pope Leo XIV is the Vatican Bank’s sole shareholder. It has only a single branch located in a former Vatican dungeon in the Torrione di Nicoló V (Tower of Nicholas V). The new Pope can order the release of the wartime Vatican Bank archives with the speed and ease with which a U.S. president issues an executive order. It would be a bold move in an institution with a well-deserved reputation for keeping files hidden sometimes for centuries. It took more than 400 years for the Church to release some of its Inquisition files (and at long last exonerate Galileo Galilei), and more than 700 years before it cleared the Knights Templar of a heresy charge and opened the trial records.

Opening the Vatican Bank’s wartime archives would send the unequivocal message that transparency is not merely a talking point, but instead a high priority that the new Pope plans to apply to the finances of the church, both in its history as well as going forward. Such a historic decree will mark his Papacy as having shed some light on one of the church’s darkest chapters. In so doing, Pope Leo will pay tribute to the families of victims of World War II who have been long been demanding transparency and some semblance of justice.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. That truism, now known as the "Sagan standard" after science communication Carl Sagan, has been around in some form since David Hume first published it in the 1740s. But, with modern-day data collection, sometimes even extraordinary evidence isn't enough - it's how you interpret it. That's the argument behind a new pre-print paper by Luis Welbanks and their colleagues at Arizona State University and various other American institutions. They analyzed the data behind the recent claims of biosignature detection in the atmosphere of K2-18b and found that other non-biological interpretations could also explain the data.

Most astronomers agree that life is likely common throughout the Universe. While Earth is the only world known to have life, we know that life arose early on our world, and the building blocks of life, including amino acids and sugars, form readily. We also know there are countless worlds in the cosmos that might be home for life. But just because life is likely, that doesn't mean proving it will be easy. Many of the biosignatures we can observe can also have abiotic origins. So how can we be sure? One way is to compare our observations of a habitable world with other worlds in the system.