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Lithium-ion batteries have been a staple in device manufacturing for years, but the liquid electrolytes they rely on to function are quite unstable, leading to fire hazards and safety concerns. Now, researchers are pursuing a reliable alternative energy storage solution for use in laptops, phones and electric vehicles: solid-state electrolytes (SSEs).

The White House Releases its 2026 Budget Request for NASA. Cuts to SLS, Gateway and Orion

The center of the Milky Way is a busy place, tightly packed with stars and dominated by the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*. It also features powerful magnetic fields that regulate star production, influence gas dynamics and gas cloud formation, and even affect the accretion processes around Sagittarius A*. Gigantic filaments of gas that look like bones form along the magnetic field lines, and one of them appears to be fractured.

Regions from Ukraine to Mongolia are seeing a spike in paired heatwave-drought events as climate change alters weather patterns across the planet

Researchers have created a hairlike device for long-term, non-invasive monitoring of the brain's electrical activity. The lightweight and flexible electrode attaches directly to the scalp and delivers stable, high-quality electroencephalography (EEG) recordings.

Space junk and meteoroids are falling to Earth every year, posing a growing risk as they re-enter the atmosphere at high speeds. Researchers are using infrasound sensors to track these objects, including bolides, which are meteoroids breaking apart in the sky. New research shows that infrasound signals can help track these objects, but the trajectory needs to be considered, especially for objects entering at shallow angles. This study highlights the importance of improving monitoring techniques for planetary defense and space junk management.

New research reveals how Saharan dust impacts solar energy generation in Europe. Dust from North Africa reduces photovoltaic (PV) power output by scattering sunlight, absorbing irradiance, and promoting cloud formation. The study, based on field data from 46 dust events between 2019 and 2023, highlights the difficulty of predicting PV performance during these events. Conventional forecasting tools often fail, so the team suggests integrating real-time dust load data and aerosol-cloud coupling into models for better solar energy scheduling and preparedness.

As the number of electric vehicles increases, their increased demand could strain the grid – but small financial incentives convinced drivers to ease that demand by charging during off-peak hours

It looks like Natural History magazine has given an implicit endorsement—or at least a platform—to Princeton anthropology professor Agustín Fuentes.  We’ve met him before, and not under pleasant circumstances, as the man is wont to distort science and mislead his readers in the cause of progressive ideology. To see all the pieces I’ve written about him, go here (and especially these pieces here, here, and here.  And for critiques of Fuentes’s misguided accusations that Darwin was a racist who justified and promoted genocide, go here and here, and also see here for one I published in Science with a bunch of evolutionists. Some of these articles show Fuentes deliberately purveying misleading statements to buttress an ideological position. For that seems to be his modus operandi.

Now Fuentes has put his view that sex is not a binary into a new book, an excerpt of which was published in the latest Natural History, a magazine I always liked. This single bad article won’t change my mind about it (as the multiple bad articles in Scientific American did about that rag), but it makes me question the editors’ judgment. Do they know ANY biology? The reason I ask is that the excerpt is so tedious, dreadful, tendentious, misleading, and convoluted that it wouldn’t pass muster in a real scientific journal, and even a scientifically ignorant editor could see the problem with the arguments (and also correct the bad writing).

You can’t go to the article by clicking on the headline; and I don’t have a link, either. I was sent a pdf by a disaffected reader, and that’s what I’ll quote from. Perhaps you can find a copy if you dig around.

The overweening problem with this article is that it doesn’t show that the binary view is wrong, or that biological sex is really a spectrum. What Fuentes does (and he doesn’t really define biological sex) is to show that within the two constructs he takes to represent sex, there is a lot of variation in various traits.  Men don’t all behave in a way that differs from the way all women behave, development of sex is complicated, people of different sex have different “lived experiences” (yes, he says that), the structure of families vary among cultures, and so on.

But of course all of this variation, and the multidimensional definition of sex, neglects the big problem: is biological sex binary?  Yes it is: males have reproductive systems that evolved to produce small mobile gametes (sperm) and females have systems evolved to produce larger immobile gametes (eggs). There are only two types of gametes—no more. Biologists have arrived at this definition for two reasons: it’s universal in all animals and plants, and also because of its utility: the different investment in gametes usually leads to differential investment in offspring,  which explains not only sex differences in behavior, but sexual selection itself, which produces sexual dimorphism in appearance and sexual behavior. The exceptions to a strict binary defined (really “recognized”) this way range from about 1/5600 individuals to 1/20,000, and that’s as close to a binary you can get in biology.

What Fuentes does is throw a lot of sand in the reader’s eyes, showing variation within sexes and across cultures, hoping that at the end the reader will say, “Hey, maybe sex isn’t a binary after all.” But that variation does not touch the thesis he’s trying to depose. The man doesn’t know how to debate, so, like a true ideologue, he changes the ground of argumentation.

First (probably in the nonquoted parts of his book), he defines the sexes in an introductory note as “3Gfemales” and “3Gmales”, referring to “typical biological patterns of association between genetics-gonads-genitals in human bodies.” I presume he means that members of each have has the typical chromosomal constitutions of its type (e.g. XX in females) as well as gonads (that presumably means testes vs. ovaries) and genital morphology. Fuentes adds that “while useful as general categories, not all people fit into the 3G classifications.” So that is his definition, and of course since it involves more than gametes, will naturally be less binary than the biological definition. A male with a tiny penis, for example, perhaps because of a disorder of sex determination, would be called a biological male if he has testes, but is something else according to Fuentes. But Fuentes doesn’t say what such an individual is. How many sexes are there? An infinite number? And is that true of raccoons, Drosophila, and robins?

Okay, here comes the sand, so cover your eyes. I’ll have to use screenshots since I can’t copy and paste from this pdf:

Variation in sexual behavior:

But it is not “human sexuality” that is the binary, but the definition of sex.  Surely Fuentes recognizes that he is deviating from the main issue his book (and this article) is about: the binary nature of defined sex, as seen in every species of animal and plant. That doesn’t mean that sexuality and its expression is binary.  I’m not sure whether there’s a name for this kind of argumentation, but what he’s doing is clear.

He drags in variation in family structure, too:

Again, all this does is refute a binary of families, not of sexes. Why is it in there? What is the sweating professor trying to say?

Fuentes dwells at length on how sex is basically irrelevant in medicine because sexes show variation in their responses to drugs and get diseases at different rates, implying that the binary is all but useless for doctors. I read to my doctor several paragraphs of Fuentes’s screed, and I won’t give his reaction save to say that it was “not positive.” For example, can you even understand this?:

Stable? “Perceived instability”? What is he banging on about? He doesn’t say.

And females are too complicated to deal with in biology, medicine, and health? What is he talking about?  When a patient goes to see a doctor, it’s essential for the doctor to know the patient’s biological sex. Not only are some diseases specific to sexes (prostate cancer, ovarian or uterine cancer) as are some conditions (menopause), but a good doctor will realize that heart disease (and other diseases) can present differently in the sexes, and will investigate further based on that. Females with heart disease, for example, present more often with indigestion-like symptoms than do males. Now of course there are factors other than sex involved in treating a patient (do they drink, smoke, or eat too much?), but saying that sex is pretty much useless when treating patients is simply dumb. It can even be harmful (though he doesn’t say how):

Again, does any doctor pay attention only to sex? I don’t know of one. To be sure, Fuentes grudgingly admits that there are “two sets of reproductive physiologies” that are relevant to medicine, but minimizes the importance of sex. And to be sure, some diseases are recognized and treated identically in males and females, but to ignore biological sex as a doctor is sheer incompetence.

In another example, Fuentes notes that Ambien doesn’t work the way you’d predict in women if you just reduces the male dosage based on a smaller weight of females.  Why doesn’t this work? Because the drug clears from women “3G females” (did the doctors check all the “G”s?) more slowly than from “3G males.”   He uses this difference to attack the sex binary, by saying that we don’t understand why this average difference occurs, saying “asking about the actual physiological response, rather than assuming 3G males and 3G females are different kinds of humans, is a better approach.”

But again, this is irrelevant to the sex binary; it is about the mechanism of a difference between (Fuentes’s) biological sexes.  And, interestingly, one of the mechanisms he suggests is “attention should be focused on the varying levels of acting testosterone in attenuating the effectiveness of [Ambien].”

Testosterone! Well at least that has some connection with biological sex, no? Fuentes then tries to efface the difference in hormone levels by saying this:  “Testosterone is not characterizable as a male or female hormone, but rather by variation in circulating levels among humans, with 3G males usually having much higher levels than 3G males.”

In reality, we’ve long known that both testes and ovaries produce testosterone, but the distribution of salivary testosterone in the sexes is indeed variable in each sex, and there is hardly any overlap between the sexes: Since testosterone prompts the development of secondary sex traits, including behavior, it’s the binary nature of sex that produce an almost nonoverlapping distribution of hormones. But one should not imply, as Fuentes does, that variation of hormone levels in each sex means that the sexes themselves are non-binary.

(From paper): Figure 1. Shown is a depiction of the bimodal distribution of raw, baseline salivary testosterone values (in pg/mL) when including both men (N = 360) and women (N = 407). All saliva samples were collected and assayed by the present author using radioimmunoassay (Schultheiss and Stanton, 2009). The displayed testosterone data were aggregated from several past studies by the author, and for graphical purposes only, exclude eight male participants with testosterone levels between 150 and 230 pg/mL.

I don’t want to go on much longer, but I’ll add that Fuentes conflates sex and gender several times, and uses familiar tropes to dispel the binary, like the existence of hermaphroditic earthworms, which of course produce only two types of gametes, but in one body. He even shows a photo of a bluehead wrasse, which, like the clownfish (but in the other direction), changes sex in social groups (the head of a group of females is male, but if he dies a female changes sex and becomes the alpha-fish).  And like the clownfish, this doesn’t dispel the sex binary because again, there are only two forms, one producing sperm and one producing eggs. Nobody ever claimed that a biological female can gametically transform into a biological male or vice versa. As always, there are only two reproductive systems, classified by their type of gamete. Neither of these animals produces a third type of gamete.

At the end, Fuentes reprises his error of saying that variation within sexes dispels any notion of a sex binary, and even lapses into philosophisizing:

I love the “why and how humans are in the world.” It’s totally meaningless!  But wait! There’s more:

Of course there is intra- and inter-sex diversity in levels of hormones, behavior, sexual behavior, family structure, and so on.  But there is no diversity within a sex about the type of gamete it is set up to produce, either sperm or eggs (or both in the case of hermaphrodites, which Fuentes calls “intersex”).  And that IS a universal truth about being male or female, a truth that was recognized a long time before social justice ideology arose, and a reognition that had nothing to do with that ideology. Now it does, for even a dolt can see that Fuentes’s real aim to to dispel the binary definition of sex in any way he can, for he considers that definition to be harmful to people who don’t identify as either male or female. It isn’t. If the facts get in the way of ideology for people like Fuentes, they either ignore or misrepresent the facts. Here the entire article is a form of misrepresentation. ****************** At my own ending I’ll quote, with permission, part of the email that the reader who sent me this pdf wrote, just because I liked the email:

 

. . . last night, I was flabbergasted to read in the table of contents of the latest issue of Natural History, ‘Sex is a Spectrum: Why the binary view is problematic.”

That rumbling you just heard was SJG [Stephen Jay Gould] and his biologist forebears from this magazine spinning in their graves. Or so I infer.

OK, I am not a biologist and wouldn’t even try to play one on TV, and so wouldn’t claim the credentials or background to properly critique this. But I do have to wonder at the author’s writing in pretzel knots to avoid, for example, using the term “women” (preferred: “Humans with uteri” [p. 23]), or writing things I find hard to swallow (“the number of mating types (often called “sexes”) per kind of species…[is] two and sometimes three in most animals…”). I’d really like to know the animals that have three sexes (and what the third kind is called, and who it mates with).

h/t: Alex, Robert

Scientists have created an antivenom that has shown promise against some of the world's deadliest snakes after collecting antibodies from a hyperimmune man who exposed himself to their toxins

As climate change pushes summer temperatures to new highs, energy infrastructure such as cabling and transformers will struggle to cope

Has your dinner time conversations been dragging a bit of late? Feel like raising its knowledge level to a bit higher than the usual synopsis of the most recent reality TV show? Then take the challenge presented by Sean Carroll in his book "The Biggest Ideas in the Universe – Space, Time and Motion". Using this, your conversation might soon be sparkling with grand thoughts about modern physics, time travel, going faster than light and the curvature of the universe.

Astronomers have explained how a galaxy cluster maintains its heat, despite emitting X-rays that cool the hot gas at its center. The group discovered the existence of a fast-moving, high-temperature gas flow in the center of the Centaurus cluster. The result suggests how the cool down of the hot gas is avoided and why clusters look like they do.

A watched pot never boils, goes the old saying, but many of us have at least kept an eye on the pot, waiting for the bubbling to start. It's satisfying to finally see the rolling boil, behind which complex physical mechanisms are at play. When this happens, the bubbles that form continuously change in shape and size. These dynamic movements influence the surrounding fluid flow, thereby affecting the efficiency of heat transfer from the heat source to the water. Manipulating small amounts of liquid at high speeds and frequencies is essential for processing large numbers of samples in medical and chemical fields, such as in cell sorting. Microbubble vibrations can create flows and sound waves, aiding in liquid manipulation. However, the collective behavior and interactions of multiple bubbles is poorly understood, so their applications have been limited.

While dolphins are known to transmit information in their whistles, until now it hasn't been clear whether the marine mammals used the same sounds to indicate a shared understanding of a concept

Well, dear readers, this is the last of the photos I have to show you, and there are but two. If you have good photos, send them in–STAT!  Thanks.

From reader Christopher Moss, bald eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus). His captions are indented, and if you want to enlarge the photos, click on them.

Not terribly good, as they are cropped to the centre of the original, despite using a 750mm lens. I had noticed something black on the frozen pond, and when the eagle landed to investigate I realised something had died there. The crows were squawking a lot and I wondered if it was one of their number.

Oh! I just found 24 more photo from Richard Pieniakowski, so we have a couple of days’ worth (his captions).  I will just add the first two because they’re the same species as above.

Bald eagle perched in snowfall:

Bald eagle flying through snow:

‘Shocking’ results from a major astronomical study have raised doubts about the standard model of cosmology, forcing scientists to consider new ways of understanding dark energy and gravity

Knowing someone's position on a contentious topic can allow you to predict their views in other areas, thanks to an artificial intelligence that maps patterns between beliefs

Our Medical Establishment stood up for the right of anti-vaxxers to die in droves. They reject your bodily autonomy and medical freedom.

The post How Our Medical Establishment Went From”Don’t Make Anyone Get a Vaccine” to “Don’t Let Anyone Get a Vaccine” first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.