News Feeds

Neuromorphic computers modeled after the human brain can now solve the complex equations behind physics simulations — something once thought possible only with energy-hungry supercomputers. The breakthrough could lead to powerful, low-energy supercomputers while revealing new secrets about how our brains process information.

These are the last photos I have, and I’ve gathered singletons in a potpourri of photos. Please send me any good wildlife photos you have—otherwise there will be a LACUNA tomorrow. Captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

From Pratyaydipta Rudra in Oklahoma.

This is a Pine Squirrel [Tamiascirus sp.], photographed in Rocky Mountain National Park, CO.

From Adrian:

Here’s a picture of a European Pine Marten (Martes martes) from the shores of Loch Duich, near the Isle of Skye, Scotland:

From Guy:

Taken in Lake Saint Clair Metropark in Michigan a few years back by my 12 year old son Nolan at a bird-banding station where we volunteer. I think it’s a Blackpoll Warbler (Setophaga striata) with the image taken in the fall (so I don’t really know if it’s male or female):

From Robert Lang, whose house and studio burned to the ground during the California fires last year; both are being rebuilt:

Our gardener found this California native tarantula (Aphonopelma sp.) while clearing some fire debris at my former studio and, knowing that my wife had a pet tarantula and was helping the Eaton Canyon Nature Center in its fire recovery, he left it for us at our temporary home in a little plastic bottle. (Umm…the tarantula was in a little plastic bottle. Not our home.) After we determined that ECNC didn’t have a place for one yet, we released it locally, but I took this picture before it wandered away. When we got home from the release, there was another plastic bottle on the porch with another tarantula inside.

A Hummingbird Moth (species unknown) from Marty Riddle:

The Hawk Moths, aka Hummingbird Moth, love the nectar in resident maintained gardens at Brooksby Village Peabody, Massachusetts:

And a cat/bird encounter from Barry Lyons:

For years now, I’ve had mourning doves  [Zenaida macroura] alight on my air conditioner. Some of them are regulars, and what interests me is that they haven’t taken the next obvious step: pecking at the window. What I mean is that a dove arrives and then stares into my apartment, sometimes moving its head back and forth: “Are you in there? Ah, there you are!” And then I get up from my chair and go feed them. But when will a dove start pecking at the window to alert me that he’s there? Why hasn’t it figured out that it’s something it can do? And at no cost to his safety because he can still fly away. And look at this photo. The dove seems to understand windows. Every time a cat goes to the window (I don’t own a cat; I cat-sit) it flares its wings instead of flying off, as if to say, “Ha ha, you can’t get me. I’m out here, you idiot.”

On 14 January, 2025, two colliding black holes sent the clearest gravitational wave signal ever recorded rippling across the universe to Earth’s detectors. This remarkably crisp signal, designated GW250114, has allowed physicists to conduct the most stringent test yet of Einstein’s general relativity by measuring multiple “tones” from the collision. The wave passed the test with flying colours, but researchers remain optimistic that future detections might finally reveal where Einstein’s century old theory breaks down, potentially offering the first glimpses of quantum gravity.

Astronomers have uncovered a distant planetary system that flips a long-standing rule of planet formation on its head. Around the small red dwarf star LHS 1903, scientists expected to find rocky planets close in and gas giants farther out — the same pattern seen in our own Solar System and hundreds of others. And at first, that’s exactly what they saw. But new observations revealed a surprise: the outermost planet appears to be rocky, not gaseous.

A massive star 2.5 million light-years away simply vanished — and astronomers now know why. Instead of exploding in a supernova, it quietly collapsed into a black hole, shedding its outer layers in a slow-motion cosmic fade-out. The leftover debris continues to glow in infrared light, offering a long-lasting signal of the black hole’s birth. The finding reshapes our understanding of how some of the universe’s biggest stars meet their end.

Astronomers have discovered a massive galaxy cluster assembling itself just one billion years after the Big Bang, there’s just one problem… it shouldn’t exist! Current models suggest it shouldn’t have formed when it did, Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and James Webb Space Telescope working in tandem, scientists spotted JADES-ID1, a protocluster containing at least 66 galaxies wrapped in a vast cloud of million degree gas forming during what should have been the universe’s infancy.

The Amaterasu particle was detected in 2021 by the Telescope Array experiment in the U.S. It is the second-highest-energy cosmic ray ever observed, carrying around 40 million times more energy than particles accelerated at the Large Hadron Collider. Such particles are exceedingly rare and thought to originate in some of the most extreme environments in the universe.

Five dietary patterns that involve eating lots of plants have been linked with living up to three years longer, even among people who are genetically predisposed to have a shorter life

I have been wondering about the question above for a while, as I’ve read quite a few novels lately that use the word “luncheon”, with seemingly no distinction between that word and “lunch”.  I was too lazy to look it up, but, typing it in the search box, I found this short (1.5-minute) YouTube explanation below:

The Oxford English Dictionary agrees (the first meaning is “A large chunk of something, esp. bread, cheese, or some other food; a thick slice, a hunk; = lunch“).  The relevant entry:

There you go. But I still would like to be able to invite a friend to a restaurant for an informal luncheon.  That’s not correct, but it’s fun to say. And, at any rate, I don’t think I’ve heard anyone say “luncheon” lately, even referring to a formal meal. And in fiction it’s used incorrectly all the time.

Finding rhinoviruses, which cause the common cold, in preserved medical specimens and analysing their RNA genome could let us trace the evolution of human illness

Simulations suggest that two enormous masses of hot rock have been involved in generating Earth’s magnetic field and giving it an irregular shape

Here’s a new article in Nature (click on the title screenshot below to read it); it’s about the dearth of information about the safety of drugs used by pregnant women. Except, to Nature, they refer not to “women” but to “pregnant people,” for in the article, that is about the only term that refers to women who are pregnant.  “Women” is used almost exclusively when it’s in quotations from others.

Here’s my count:

“Pregnant people”:  Used 41 times
“Women”:  Used 5 times, 4 of them in quotes from others

Clearly some bowdlerization is going on here.

The sad part of this article is that it has a lesson worth reading—a dearth of knowledge about how many drugs affect pregnant women—but it’s annoyingly peppered with politically correct and annoying usages. For example:

The first usage of the “pp” term is in fact in the subtitle, which I’ve highlighted below (again, click the article to read it):

Here’s a screenshot with “pregnant people” highlighted. This is only a small sample of the article:

Need I say more? What this means is that Nature is clearly truckling to the language adopted by extreme gender activists, who consider trans-identified men as “women”.  Ergo, the words “pregnant women” are seen as offensive, because “women” include trans-idenfied men who can’t have babies. Voilà:  “pregnant people.” Also, as reader Coel says below, “The main problem is trans-IDing women, aka ‘trans men’, who, being women, can get pregnant, but who they regard as ‘men’. Hence ‘pregnant women’ would exclude them, and so amount to erasure of and thus genocide of those ‘trans men’ who are indeed pregnant.”

Here are the five uses of the word “women”, all but the last quotes from other authors (they can’t sanitize other people’s words):

 

Note that the last usage of woman, not in quotes, is required because they are referring to females who are not pregnant. But the journal still slipped up: they could have used “people with uteruses”, or, like The Lancet, “bodies with vaginas”:

Conclusion: Nature has been ideologically captured. But we already knew that, didn’t we?

The journal should be ashamed of itself.

 

h/t: Schnoid

Scientists may have stumbled across a network of vessels in the brain that helps clear out waste fluid – a discovery that could "represent a paradigm shift in our understanding of all neurodegenerative diseases"

Well, this is the last batch of photos I have, and it’s very sad that the tank is empty. Please send some in if you have them. Don’t make me beg!

Today we have photos of ducks—or rather, one female duck— rom Aussie reader Keira McKenzie in Perth. Keira’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.

Here is a series of photos I took of a lone Pacific Black Duck [Anas superciliosis] from this afternoon [Feb. 11] at the park. Since the islands in the ponds have been completely cleared of all vegetation (the western island) and all the undergrowth cleared from the eastern island (this is because of the devastation throughout Perth’s trees from the polyphagous shothole borer), moat of the waterbirds have left for areas where they can roost & nest. 

The photos are taken in Hyde Park, Perth, Western Australia, on a hot humid afternoon.

I am very fond of them. I rescued one when it flew into the electric wires on the other side of the road one night. I carried it back across the road and into the park, putting it near the water’s edge. It was a pond-smelling little bundle, seemed uninjured and was very calm, and waddled off into the water and sailed into the night.

What a beautiful hen! It makes me eager for Duck Season to arrive at Botany Pond. Keira also sent a picture of her cat:

I shall sign off with a pic of my little Baba (currently zooming around the place for no apparent reason) slothing in the armchair in the heat with one of her favourite toys (the other is a wombat).

The universe is a big place, and tracking down some of the more interesting parts of it is tricky. Some of the most interesting parts of it, at least from a physics perspective, are merging black holes, so scientists spend a lot of time trying to track those down. One of the most recent attempts to do so was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters by the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) collaboration. While they didn’t find any clear-cut evidence of continuous gravitational waves from merging black hole systems, they did manage to point out plenty of false alarms, and even disprove some myths about ones we thought actually existed.

Eclipse season is nigh. The first of two eclipse seasons for 2026 kicks off next week on Tuesday, February 17th, with an annular solar eclipse. And while solar eclipses often inspire viewers to journey to the ends of the Earth in order to stand in the shadow of the Moon, this one occurs over a truly remote stretch of the world, in Antarctica.

A dazzling new Hubble image peels back the layers of the mysterious Egg Nebula, a rare and fleeting phase in a Sun-like star’s death just 1,000 light-years away. Hidden inside a dense cocoon of dust, the dying star blasts twin beams of light through a polar opening, carving glowing lobes and delicate ripples into the surrounding cloud. These striking, symmetrical arcs hint that unseen companion stars may be shaping the spectacle from within.

As data keeps exploding worldwide, scientists are racing to pack more information into smaller and smaller spaces — and a team at the University of Stuttgart may have just unlocked a powerful new trick. By slightly twisting ultra-thin layers of a magnetic material called chromium iodide, researchers created an entirely new magnetic state that hosts tiny, stable structures known as skyrmions — some of the smallest and toughest information carriers ever observed.

As data keeps exploding worldwide, scientists are racing to pack more information into smaller and smaller spaces — and a team at the University of Stuttgart may have just unlocked a powerful new trick. By slightly twisting ultra-thin layers of a magnetic material called chromium iodide, researchers created an entirely new magnetic state that hosts tiny, stable structures known as skyrmions — some of the smallest and toughest information carriers ever observed.

Immune cells in the brain that go rogue contribute to the death of neurons, so getting rid of them may slow the progression of neurodegenerative conditions like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis