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Scientists at the University of New Hampshire have unleashed artificial intelligence to dramatically speed up the hunt for next-generation magnetic materials. By building a massive, searchable database of 67,573 magnetic compounds — including 25 newly recognized materials that stay magnetic even at high temperatures — the team is opening the door to cheaper, more sustainable technologies.

A surprising breakthrough could help sodium-ion batteries rival lithium—and even turn seawater into drinking water. Scientists discovered that keeping water inside a key battery material, instead of removing it as traditionally done, dramatically boosts performance. The “wet” version stores nearly twice as much charge, charges faster, and remains stable for hundreds of cycles, placing it among the top-performing sodium battery materials ever reported.

An assessment of nearly 900 dogs has identified 12 breeds prone to brachycephalic obstructive airway syndrome, which can affect dogs' ability to sleep and exercise

Antibodies harvested from the blood of paediatricians are up to 25 times better at protecting against the common respiratory infection RSV than existing antibody therapies, and are now being developed as preventative treatments

Just a few hundred light-years from Earth, the famous variable star Mira A is huffing and puffing its outer layers to space. Its most recent mass-loss event ejected more material at higher velocity than in past events. A team of astronomers led by Theo Khouri, Chalmers University in Sweden discovered two large clouds of material expanding away from Mira A in observations done by the Very Large Telescope and ALMA telescopes in South America in 2015 and 2023. Those clouds form two lobes of a cosmic "heart" shape surrounding the star. That structure is basically a cloud of dust at the edges, filled by gas from the star.

Around 40 per cent of people are unaware that men can experience postpartum depression too — that has to change

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Fungi have become Hollywood’s go-to bad guys. But as yet another story focuses on Cordyceps, Nick Crumpton says we are missing a chance to broaden our fictional horizons

Feedback enjoys the debunking of a study that suggested a 2022 solar eclipse had been "anticipated" by a bunch of trees

Mathematician Hannah Fry travels to the front lines of AI in her new BBC documentary AI Confidential with Hannah Fry. She talks to Bethan Ackerley about what the technology is doing to us – for better and for worse

There are many courses in universities that seem not to be exercises in objective teaching and learning, but rather courses designed to foist certain political ideologies or points of view on students. One of them at this university was called to my attention by several in our community; it seems to be a course on how it’s justifiable to use violence to resist oppression. It was and is still taught by Alireza Doostdar, director of our Center for Middle Eastern Studies and Associate Professor of Islamic Studies and the Anthropology of Religion. I’ll just cover what must be one of Doostdar’s biggest areas of interest: the settler-colonialist, genocidal, and apartheid state of Israel.  Does that justify the violence of Hamas? You’d have to take the course to see, but from the syllabus it looks like terrorism against Israel is not demonized in the course.

Doostdar is one of the handful of professors here who have taken an active and visible role in pro-Palestinian demonstrations, and was, I believe, one of the 28 faculty and students arrested for trespassing at the admissions office in 2023 (disruption #3 described here; the city later dropped charges).  His brother, Ahmadreza Mohammadi Doostdar, was arrested in 2018 for spying for Iran, and was sentenced to 38 months in prison, 36 months of supervised release, and given a fine of $14,153.

Over the past couple of years Alireza Doostdar has issued a number of tweets showing his animus towards Israel, but then took them down, which is either an act of cowardice, contrition (which I doubt) or ambition (getting rid of stuff that makes you look bad). Here are three of them.  First, plaudits for Iranian missiles:

Two more Doostdar tweets I posted that have now vanished:

The thought that Iranians will rise up against their government doesn’t seem so insane now, does it?

It is clear that the man has no love for Israel, promoting as he does the false narratives of Israeli “apartheid” and “genocide.” There is, of course, no opprobrium for Hamas or other terrorist organizations.

Here’s the first page of the syllabus for one of Doostdar’s courses, which is still listed as a “Human Rights” course in the college catalogue:

Look at that image of the buff Palestinian man wielding a sling à la David and waving the Palestinian flag!  Here’s a description of the course (bolding is mine):

From 18th century slave rebellions in the Americas to 20th and 21st century anticolonial revolutions, oppressed peoples’ struggles for liberation have often incorporated violent tactics, even against noncombatants. This course examines anticolonial violence in light of the work of the Martiniquan revolutionary Frantz Fanon and some of his interlocutors. We study specific freedom movements: the Haitian and Algerian revolutions against French colonialism, Nat Turner’s slave rebellion and John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, Russian and American anarchism, Malcolm X and the Black Panthers’ mobilization against white supremacy and police violence, and the ongoing Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid. Throughout, we will pay attention to how revolutionaries evaluated the place of violence in their own movements, including criteria for justifiable and unjustifiable use of force.

Here are the readings for the section on Palestine. I haven’t looked all of them up, but looked at about a dozen, and all the ones I saw damned the apartheid, genocidal, settler-colonialist state of Israel.

None of the sources I examined condemned Hamas (the course, after all, is about justifiable violence), and all I saw were resolutely anti-Israel.

What is my conclusion? Well, first, Doostdar surely has a right to teach this course; to prohibit it because it may peddle hatred and lies (“apartheid”, “genocide,” etc.) would violate academic freedom.  All I can do is say, that as a fellow faculty member, I think the course is biased and promotes misunderstanding and hatred. Is this an academic or a polemic course?

I would add that if any Jews want to take the course (and some of course should—to see what other side is arguing), they will not emerge having learned that there’s anything good about Israel, or that the IDFs war in Gaza was justifiable. It’s ironic since Israel’s response to the attack on October 7 could also be seen as “liberatory violence” in response to yearslong Palestinian attacks on Israel, though either missiles or acts of terror.

My inspection of the syllabus and perusal of the reading suggest that this is an example of the “one-sided” syllabi that I discussed in a post last year. The authors of the study I described looked at 27 million syllabi. I summarized their results thus:

The upshot is what you might expect: “anti-progressive” (or “conservative”) works were assigned with progressive ones far less often than were works that buttressed the progressive point of view. Conclusion: liberal academia is not exposing students to credible alternative points of view (and yes, the authors took care to examine cite only works that academically credible).

Classic “progressive” works used in their analysis include the following; you won’t know the critical views so much but you can see them in the paper. I’d recommend reading the big unpublished paper if you have time as it has a lot more data.

1.  The classic progressive views of racism in the criminal-justice system:  Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book Between the World and Me
2.  The classic progressive view of the Israel/Palestine conflict (and oppression of Arabs in general): Edward Said’s book Orientalism
3.  The classic progressive “pro-choice” paper: Judith Jarvis Thomson’s paper “A Defense of Abortion“

In short, “progressive” courses did not assign views counter to the course’s own ideology nearly as often as they assigned papers buttressing that ideology. This seems to be the case in Doostdar’s course. Make of it what you will, but it looks like an example of “myside bias.“

There’s been plenty in the news about 3I/ATLAS over the course of the past 8 months. Our third confirmed interstellar visitor went behind the Sun during its closest approach, but reemerged in December with plenty of eyes watching it. Papers describing what it looks like following its closest brush with the power of a star in probably billions of years are starting to come out, including a new one available in pre-print on arXiv from Carey Lisse of Johns Hopkins University and his co-authors, which shows how much the comet - and it is definitely a comet - has changed in the matter of only a few months.

We know that supermassive black holes can inhibit star formation in their galaxies. But new research and JWST observations show that the most luminous quasars can actually suppress star formation in neighbouring galaxies. SMBH may have played a more pronounced role in shaping the early Universe than previously thought.

Prolonged grief disorder affects around 1 in 20 people, and we're starting to understand the neuroscience behind it

Microsoft researchers have developed a technology that writes data into glass with lasers, raising the prospect of robotic libraries full of glass tablets packed with data

Fathers may get postpartum depression at a similar rate to mothers, but it’s often overlooked. At last, the way we diagnose and treat it is improving, for the good of the whole family