Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Today we have a potpourri of photos from several readers. Their captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
From Robert Lang:
Every few days I drive up to Altadena to check on the progress of our rebuild. Now, 14 months after the fires of January 2025, the neighborhoods are starting to come back to life again with the sounds of hammering and sawing, but the animals that had come down from the hills still consider the area to be their own. This bobcat (Lynx rufus) wandered into the empty lot next door while I was checking on our own home’s progress:
Although our metal mailbox survived the fire, we’ve redirected all mail to our temporary home for the time being. Nevertheless, people occasionally stuff their own junk flyers into the mailbox. To help dissuade them from their paper spam, this Western black widow (Latrodectus hesperus) has taken up residence on the front of the mailbox. When disturbed, she retreats to her cozy cubbyhole under the handle, which is right where you’d put your fingers if you were going to open the mailbox to stuff something inside:
Seeing eye to eye: this California Ground Squirrel (Otospermophilus beecheyi) and Western Fence Lizard (Sceloporus occidentalis) are trying to decide who gets the top of the rock. Photograph by Merrilee Fellows.
From Todd Martin; a photo taken in, I believe, the Yucatan:
We encountered the ocellated turkey, (Meleagris ocellata), appropriately enough, on Thanksgiving day, I had no idea what it was though and took it for a brightly colored pheasant. It wasn’t posing as nicely, but this picture gives a better sense of the iridescent feathers:
And from Keira McKenzie in Perth, Australia, we have three shots of the willie wagtail (Rhipidura leucophrys):
The first is taken at a neighbour’s place. She feeds him so he comes every morning:
The other two are taken at Hyde Park.
They are called Djiji Djiji in Nhe Noongar language, which is much like the chittering it makes when cross or wary. The Latin name is Rhipidura leucophrys/
Despite being known for their chittering, they are also incredibly melodic. They wag their tails from side to side, but are actually the largest of the fantails.
They are known for their outrageous courage and will take on anything – cats, eagles, hawks, people – and win! Every time 😀
They are an utter delight and common all over Australia (though the ones in my neighbourhood have gone along with the trees – the increasing heat has caused them to stop nesting in my front yard).
And they are tiny. Tiny and mighty 🙂
They are very cute. And fierce with their white eyebrows over their bright black eyes 🙂
From Mark Gregor-Pearse in Texas:
This Great Egret (Ardea alba) was photographed on March 9, 2026, at the Puente Río Cuale in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, with an iPhone 17 Pro. These large wading birds hunt by remaining perfectly still before striking with lightning speed to spear fish, frogs, and other small aquatic prey. Males and females look nearly identical, so it is difficult to determine the sex from a photo. In the early 1900s, Great Egrets were nearly driven to extinction because their delicate breeding plumes were prized for women’s hats. Public outrage over the slaughter helped launch the modern bird conservation movement:
And a cat from Pratyaydipta Rudra:
I am hoping to send some photos for readers’ wildlife when I get some time. Meanwhile I thought you may enjoy this photo of a stray cat from India (a friend sent it to me). It really wants to experience the “magic”, but alas! It’s too expensive.
All I can say is “WTF,” or rather the words it stands for. If you’ll recall, when Trump announced the American attack on Iran, he implied that our intervention would lead to regime change and freedom for the oppressed Iranian people: He said to those people: “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take.” Since then he’s been canny about regime change, never explicitly saying that it’s one of the goals of the war.
Nevertheless, Trump’s repeated assertions that there has already been regime change implies further that this was a goal. But his statement is mendacious, for he simply means that by assassinating the Ayatollah and his son, there’s new leadership in Iran. That’s true, but the new leader of Iran is a hard-liner who clearly wants to carry on with the theocracy.
Perhaps because I read Masih Alinejad’s X feed every day, and have been doing so for years, I am desperate to see her aspirations met: democracy in Iran and an end to religious control of the government and violent oppression of dissidents and protestors.
Now, however, Trump is not only canny about that goal, but seems to have repudiated it. If he bombs all of Iran’s infrastructure, as he’s threatened to do, that is an attack on the people of Iran. It also won’t endear us to the people, most of whom previously wanted U.S. intervention to promote freedom. The lates report from the WSJ says this:
President Trump escalated his aggressive rhetoric toward Iran, threatening to wipe out the entirety of the country’s civilization if Tehran doesn’t cede to his demands by 8 p.m. Tuesday. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Note his bogus claim that “we have Complete and total Regime Change”, with “less radicalized” people in charge. That’s a baldfaced lie.
More from the WSJ:
Trump’s message marks an escalation of his aggressive rhetoric toward Tehran. He has threatened to strike all of Tehran’s power plants and bridges. Under international law, the military is allowed to strike civilian power plants and other key infrastructure only if it contributes to a military operation and civilian harm is minimized.
Under international law, the military is allowed to strike civilian power plants and other key infrastructure only if it contributes to a military operation and civilian harm is minimized.
This could of course simply be posturing: Trump’s unused strategy of blustering and making threats he has no intention to carry out—a way to force Iran to sign on to a ceasefire. We don’t know. But if the “extortion, corruption, and death” will finally end, so will the hopes of the Iranian people and those of us who want to see them living free.
Welcome to the cruelest day: Tuesday, April 7, 2026, and National Beer Day, celebrating the day that Prohibition (of beer) was ended in 1933. FDR was elected with the promise to repeal Prohibition, and he did. In December all alcohol was legalized. But weak beer was okay on April 7, and here ar e the good things that happened:
The Abner-Drury Brewery sent a guarded truck to the White House at a minute past midnight with two cases of beer for Roosevelt, though when it arrived, it became apparent he was asleep. The Marine guarding the beer opened the first bottle and drank it, allowing the press to photograph him. Roosevelt later sent the cases of beer to the National Press Club. People across the country gathered outside breweries on April 7, some of whom camped outside the night prior. An estimated 1.5 million barrels of beer were consumed, with an estimated $5 million of beer being sold in Chicago alone. Hundreds of breweries, bars, and taverns could reopen and expand again, hiring workers and buying new equipment, while restaurants could sell alcohol again. In the four months that followed, manufacturing grew by 78%, automobile and heavy equipment sales by almost 200%, the stock market by 71%, and approximately four million people found employment, with approximately 500,000 more jobs being created in related industries. Prohibition officially ended on December 5, 1933 with the passage of the 21st Amendment.
Banning alcohol is a dumb thing to do and also cannot be enforced.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 7 Wikipedia page.
And here’s an old Jesus and Mo cartoon that reader Peter found and sent along. It’s about mythicism, the view that Jesus was one of many people claiming to be a savior:
On the sixth day, 248,655 miles from Earth, four people ventured farther from home than any human being who has ever lived.
Embraced by the moon’s gravitational pull, four astronauts accelerated Monday afternoon on a path to swing around the lunar far side, five days after launching on the Artemis II mission from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
“Today, for all humanity, you’re pushing beyond that frontier,” said Jenni Gibbons, a Canadian Space Agency astronaut who was the main point of contact for the crew at mission control in Houston.
“We most importantly choose this moment to challenge this generation and the next to make sure this record is not long-lived,” he said.
A few hours later, Mr. Hansen, along with Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch of NASA, became the first humans in more than half a century to slip behind the moon.
At 6:44 p.m. Eastern time, video transmission from Artemis II blinked out, and the astronauts were cut off from the world’s other eight billion people. As the spaceship they named Integrity passed over the far side of the moon, they reached their greatest distance from Earth — more than a quarter-million miles — and their closest proximity to the moon at a bit over 4,000 miles.
After 40 minutes of silence, the astronauts reconnected with humanity. From their windows, they watched as a thin crescent of sunlit Earth reappeared.
There’s a lot of emotionality (and some God talk) being emitted on the radio from both Houston and Artemis: more than I remember in previous space shots. The Christian emissions come mainly from pious astronaut Victor Glover, but we also heard this from commander Jeremy Hansen in his Easter address:
“No matter your faith or religion, for me the teachings of Jesus were always a very simple truth of love, universal love. Love yourself, and love others.”
Do we need this stuff broadcast from space on a trip funded by people who don’t think Jesus was a messiah? Can’t they keep their faith to themselves? And why didn’t Glover add that the teachings of Jesus included an admonition to follow him lest you be damned to a fiery eternal torment in hell?
It’s Monday, April 6, and the thirty-eighth day of Operation Roaring Lion. The global price of oil has reached $108, down less than a percent since yesterday. Here are the latest developments that occurred while you were asleep:
A source told Reuters that Pakistan’s army commander spent the night in direct contact with U.S. Vice President Vance, envoy Witkoff, and Iranian Foreign Minister Araghchi. The emerging proposal calls for an immediate ceasefire and reopening of the Strait of Hormuz, followed by direct talks in Pakistan within 15–20 days to reach a broader agreement. An Iranian official responded to the report, saying they are reviewing Pakistan’s proposal, but Iran would not agree to open the Strait of Hormuz for a temporary ceasefire.
Four bodies were recovered from the rubble of a Haifa residential building struck by an Iranian ballistic missile yesterday, with rescue teams still searching for two additional missing people, including a child and an elderly person. An 82-year-old man who was seriously wounded has undergone surgery and remains sedated and ventilated; his 78-year-old wife is hospitalized in good condition. A 10-month-old baby was among the lightly wounded.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards have confirmed the killing of Major General Majid Khademi, head of the IRGC’s Intelligence Directorate, in a U.S.-Israeli strike. Khademi, who had served in Iran’s intelligence and security apparatus for nearly five decades, was responsible for surveillance of Iranian citizens and for orchestrating attacks against Jews worldwide.
And one news item (there’s more at the site):
Donald Trump has issued a 24-hour extension, giving the regime until tomorrow at 8 p.m. ET to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The extension appears to be tied to the prospect of negotiations. According to sources familiar with the talks in Islamabad, the United States and Iran are discussing terms for a potential 45-day ceasefire (though Reuters puts it at 15–20 days) that could lead to a permanent end to the war.
The mediators are discussing a two-stage framework:
Stage One: A 45-day ceasefire during which negotiations would take place to end the war.
Stage Two: A final agreement to officially end the conflict.
This proposal strikes a somewhat dissonant tone. For the past two weeks, reports of negotiations have spanned from outright denial to thoroughly unenthusiastic. Apart from Trump’s triumphalist rhetoric claiming Iran is begging for peace, there has been very little indication that a deal is actually forthcoming. The sources familiar with the talks are largely in harmony with previous statements: according to them, the chances of reaching even a partial agreement in the next 48 hours are low.
“We only accept an end of the war with guarantees that we won’t be attacked again,” Mojtaba Ferdousi Pour, head of Iran’s diplomatic mission in Cairo, told The Associated Press. He said Iran no longer trusts the Trump administration after the U.S. bombed the Islamic Republic twice during previous rounds of talks.
Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency said Tehran conveyed its response through Pakistan, a key mediator.
And yet a regional official involved in talks said efforts had not collapsed. “We are still talking to both sides,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss closed-door diplomacy.
Ferdousi Pour said Iranian and Omani officials were working on a mechanism for administrating the strait, through which a fifth of the world’s oil is shipped in peacetime. Iran’s grip on it has shaken the world economy. Tehran has refused to let U.S. and Israeli vessels through after they started the war on Feb. 28.
Iran’s rejection came after Israel struck a key petrochemical plant in the South Pars natural gas field and killed two paramilitary Revolutionary Guard commanders.
The gas field attack aimed at eliminating a major source of revenue for Iran, Israel said. The field, the world’s largest, is shared with Qatar. It is critical to electricity production, but the strike appeared to be separate from Trump’s threats.
An earlier Israeli attack on the field in March prompted Iran to target energy infrastructure in other Middle East countries, a major escalation.
Trump has warned Iran that the U.S. could set the country “back to the stone ages.”
Word of Iran’s rejection of the ceasefire proposal came while Trump addressed an Easter event on the White House lawn, and it was not clear whether he was aware. But he also was scheduled to hold a news conference later Monday.
“If they don’t cry uncle, no bridges, no power plants, no anything,” Trump said of Iran. “But they will.”
He also threatened to go further. “If I had my choice, what would I like to do? Take the oil,” he said, suggesting it could be done easily, but “unfortunately the American people would like to see us come home.”
Asked if Tuesday at 8 p.m. Washington time was his final deadline for Iran, Trump replied simply, “Yeah.”
I doubt that a permanent end to the war can be cobbled together before tonight, and so the bombing will go on. I can’t believe that Iran doesn’t want an end to the war, but the U.S. wants the Strait opened and nuclear material destroyed with a promise that Iran will stop making bombs. And how will we guarantee that Iran stops exporting terrorism? I don’t think we can, and I don’t really see any agreement that will make the U.S. successful in its aims, which at one time including regime change to free the Iranian people. But that was then. . .
We should not be destroying the infrastructure that the Iranian people depend on—the very people to whom Trump promised freedom.
*The Jerusalem Post reports that a U.S. court has reinstated $655 million judgement against the Palestinian Authority and the Palestinian Liberation Organization for damages to American citizens during the second intifada.
The federal Court of Appeals in New York has reinstated a 2015 judgment that ordered the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority to pay $655.5 million in damages to victims of terrorism from the period of the Second Intifada.
Last week, a federal Court of Appeals judge ruled to reinstate the original 2015 decision of Sokolow v. the Palestinian Authority.
This reverses the decisions of the Second US Circuit Court of Appeals in New York in August 2016, which ordered the $655.5 million terrorism case to be dismissed, saying that the court system had no jurisdiction over the PA or its sister organization, the PLO, and the US Supreme Court in April 2018.
Since then, Shurat Hadin – Israel Law Center, which led the legal charge and hoped the US Supreme Court would uphold the original district court decision, has been fighting to have the original decision reinstated.
Their central argument is that the PA’s ‘pay for slay’ policy, which rewards Palestinians terrorists and their families for crimes against Jews, incentivizes terrorism and makes the Authority responsible for such acts.
If you don’t know about the “pay for slay” policy, you should read Wikipedia’s euphemistic article, “Palestinian Authority Martyrs Fund, which describes all the goodies Palestinians and their families get if they attack or murder Israelis.
The PA spends nearly $350 million per year on ‘pay for slay’, but just $220 million for its other welfare programs for the rest of its citizens.”
While under Trump the U.S. has cut its aid to the Palestinian Authority so that no money will go to this fund, in reality U.S. aid can readily be redirected to the fund. This means that we’re still supporting terrorism.
The award to the victims is about three times the annual budget of the Pay for Slay program, but there is no mechanism I can see for the PA to pay off this judgement, and so it remains symbolic.
The Sokolow case started in 2004, when the families of victims of the Second Intifada filed a lawsuit against the PLO and PA, led by Shurat Hadin.
Among the victims were members of the Gritz, Coulter, Blutstein, and Carter families, who lost their children in the bombing of the Hebrew University Cafeteria in 2002; the Goldberg family, which lost the father in the bus No. 19 bombing in Jerusalem; and victims including Shaina Gold, Jonathan and Alan Bauer, Shaul Mendelcorn, and Mark Sokolow, who were injured in various attacks on Jaffa Road in Jerusalem.
The basis for the Sokolow case was the Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA), which was passed by Congress in 1992. In it, the families argued that the PLO and the PA financed and orchestrated seven separate attacks, and that these specific organizations were responsible for the terrorist attacks between January 2001 and February 2004.
. . .Attorney Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, founder of Shurat Hadin, said the ruling marks a “historic turning point in the fight against terrorism.”
“Not only does it restore the ability of American victims of terrorism to obtain compensation after years of struggle, but it also changes the rules of the game: from now on, US courts will be able to hear cases that previously could not even be brought before them,” she said. “This is a day of great victory in our determined fight to cut off the financial lifelines of terrorist organizations.”
Again, largely symbolic. The PA will not lose a shekel because of the judgement.
When readers of the Atlanta Jewish Times opened their Passover edition last week, they saw something surprising: a fluffy challah.
The leavened bread, forbidden for Jews to consume during the holiday, appeared in an ad placed by Nathalie Kanani, a candidate for state Senate in a Metro Atlanta district.
“Have a blessed Passover,” the ad said, over an image of a challah draped in an Israeli flag alongside two towering candles. “Wishing you a Passover rich in divine love and blessings.”
The ad quickly drew ridicule online, particularly after Greg Bluestein, a Jewish Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter, tweeted about it on Saturday, writing, “It’s the thought that counts, I guess.”
That night, Kanani issued an apology, calling the inclusion of challah in the ad “an oversight that should not have happened” and saying that her campaign was instituting new processes to prevent similar snafus in the future.
“My intent was to honor our Jewish neighbors and friends. We are all human, and even with the best intentions, honest mistakes can happen,” she wrote. “I believe in meeting those moments with grace and using them to bring people of different cultures together, not tear them apart.”
Kanani added, “While this content was created by a consultant working with my campaign, I take full responsibility for everything shared in my name. We are implementing stronger review processes to ensure this does not happen again. As always, my campaign stands for inclusion, respect, and bringing all people together.”
The incident is also spurring potential reforms at the Atlanta Jewish Times. “The ad should not have passed proofing checks,” Michael Morris, the newspaper’s owner and publisher, wrote in an email to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Sunday.
This is like wishing Muslims a happy Ramadan by showing a big plate of pork chops to help break their fast.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the two cats are plotting against Andrzej:
Hili: He has already gone to bed.
Szaron: We will start tormenting him in a moment.
In Polish:
Hili: On już położył się do łóżka.
Szaron: Zaraz zaczniemy go dręczyć.
Masih announces the execution of another Iranian protestor by the government—the government that Trump says has undergone “regime change”:
We wake up every morning to the news of another execution.
They are traumatizing an entire nation.
This morning the Islamic Republic executed Ali Fahim, another detainee for protesting.
With this execution, the number of political prisoners put to death in Iran’s prisons over… pic.twitter.com/uhN4vE6RZ4
From Luana. It’s unbelievable that murals of the murdered Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska are being defaced, and the vandalism must surely involve “reverse racial differences”, since she was white and her killer was black (but also mentally ill). I presume that’s what the “Hmmm” means.
• She’s a woman
• She’s an immigrant
• She’s Ukrainian
I might have posted this before, so sue me if I did. It’s a new genre: Irish cowboy dancing:
The Gardiner Brothers and Keeva Corry brought the thunder to Dolly Parton’s Jolene! They’re powerful, precise, and that footwork is INSANE! One of the coolest crossovers I’ve seen. Watch till the end! 😻😅 pic.twitter.com/2YvTxEBN0L
— Catarina Senora Gatita (@WyattCatarina) April 1, 2026
Larry the Number Ten Cat really doesn’t like Trump:
Putting all your eggs in one basket is never a good idea, especially at Easter https://t.co/Pus0WaAVyt
Look how this lovebird strips the leaves removing each midvein to tuck amongst its feathers for safe keeping
rather than taking each piece home separately, this is a more efficient way of gathering and transporting nest building material pic.twitter.com/frSDAeH6cS
A tortoise scam tweeted by Matthew (Jonathan was falsely declared dead. He’s 144 years old, blind from cataracts, and has lost his sense of smell, but he still gets around.)
Amazing that he could come up with such a scam, but I guess he’s had a long time to think about it.
Once again we have an article about how science could be improved if only it incorporated indigenous “ways of knowing”—the “braiding of knowledge” referred to in the Guardian article below (click to read). I often see another metaphor used to express the same thing: “two-eyed seeing”, with one eye seeing the way indigenous people do, and the other way modern science does. (I won’t use the term “Western science,” often used to denigrate it.) The implication is that modern science is half blind without indigenous knowledge.
And once again we see five things. The first is that indigenous knowledge is local knowledge, usually about how to grow food or harvest other things that enhance the lives of locals.
Second, indigenous “ways of knowing” are not science in the modern sense—the sense that involves hypothesis testing, doubt, controlled experiments, blind testing statistics, data analysis, and mathematics. Indigenous “science” does not avail itself of these essential items in the toolkit of science. Rather, it usually involves using trial and error (mainly about food), and if something works, it becomes “knowledge”. Such knowledge—like how to build the “clam gardens” copiously mentioned in the article below—may be true and may indeed be “knowledge” conceived of as “justified true belief”, but justification usually doesn’t involve replication.
Third, the “braiding” is asymmetrical: modern science can contribute much more to indigeous practices than the other way around. How to build clam gardens or harvest sweetgrass is, after all, not something that’s widely applicable, while principles of genetics, quantum mechanics, chemistry, and so on, are universal, and science can do a lot to help indigenous people with issues like medicine, probably the most important area of asymmetry. We do not often adopt indigenous medical practices, but the other way around is pervasive, because modern medicine, based largely on science, works..
Fourth, examples of indigenous knowledge that are given in the article are few. These article are usually a lot more about people touting “other ways of knowing”, and calling attention to the past oppression of indigenous people, than they are about the expansion of human knowledge.
Finally, the article completely neglects examples of the damage done to the environment by indigeous people, and these examples are not rare. They cannot be mentioned because what indigenous people do must be uniformly regarded as good. But they are not, as the date below the fold show.
Examples of indigenous knowledge. I would be remiss if I neglected the “ways of knowing” that the article says should be braided with modern science. There are not many, but this list is pretty exhaustive from the article. Excerpts from it are indented, and my comments are flush left.
Clam gardens:
Beginning at least 4,000 years ago, Native communities built clam gardens into the intertidal zone from Washington state through coastal British Columbia, and into south-east Alaska. They are a unique form of mariculture that provide harvestable habitat for an array of tasty ocean creatures like butter clams – collected “in great numbers, then smoked and dried and stored and traded”, Hatch said. But they also yielded red rock crab, basket cockles, sea cucumbers, limpets, sea snails and seaweeds in a veritable smorgasbord for humans and marine mammals, such as otters.
These gardens change where sediment moves and may protect against increasing shoreline erosion; studies also show that clam productivity and populations are higher inside gardens than outside them.
Yes, this is an advance in growing clams, and may have other salubrious environmental effects, though they aren’t documented. At any rate, stemming erosion would be limited because clam gardens are restricted in size.
Sweetgrass harvesting:
Still, the necessity of “proving” the validity of longstanding Indigenous practices can frustrate. Suzanne Greenlaw, a citizen of the Houlton Band of Maliseet Indians, is an ecologist at the Schoodic Institute, a non-profit of the National Park Service (NPS) that supports Wabanaki-led research. She participated in a 2016 study to understand how sweet grass, which grows in salt marshes, rebounds after harvesting. The study was part of a Wabanaki bid to re-establish the right to gather sweet grass from NPS land. Though the Wabanaki have made baskets from sweet grass for centuries, they have been cut off from ancestral marshes in Maine’s Acadia national park for at least 100 years.
Non-Indigenous researchers planned to conduct an environmental assessment to gauge how well plants regrew after picking, choosing sweet grass plots that had no connection to those once used by the community. This led to a comparison study in which Wabanaki practitioners demonstrated their superior understanding of how and where to harvest for the greatest ecological benefit. (They may reclaim harvest rights later this year.)
Notice that modern science will be used to verify whether the way sweetgrass is harvested affects future harvests. But that is not indigenous knowledge; rather, it’s an in-progress attempt to verify that knowledge, with the goal of helping indigenous people who have lost their right to harvest regain their rights.
Other stuff:
More Indigenous people – Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass, is a notable example – are entering academia and changing it from the inside, while some tribal nations have hired their own scientists. Non-Native institutions are seeking to undo their erasure of Indigenous cultures; the Brooklyn Botanic Garden has started to include labeling that highlights Lenape names and uses for food plants like persimmons. International environmental organizations also increasingly recognize the importance of including Indigenous voices in discussions around the climate crisis. Since 2022, there’s even been federal funding to study ways to combine Indigenous and western sciences, so each part remains distinct while being strengthened by the other.
Note that labeling plants with indigenous names is an exercise in linguistics and anthropology, not a “way of knowing”. And while indigenous people should not be excluded from discussions about practices that may affect their lives, that too is not “knowledge’ but inclusion.
More:
In fact, there are many proven correlations between Indigenous-managed food systems and ecological health. Researchers at Simon Fraser University have found that when Indigenous groups in British Columbia tended forest gardens, they not only produced an impressive biodiversity of food plants – from crabapple and hazelnut and wild plum to wild rice and cranberries – they also improved forest health.
Whyte, the University of Michigan professor, works with the Sault Ste Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians in Michigan – one of many Native nations that used prescribed burns to boost populations of sharp-tailed grouse, snowshoe hare and deer, all of which declined after the federal government’s 1911 burning ban. Collaborating with US Forest Service researchers, they conducted more than 20 ecology surveys and other projects that proved their case for fire, in the interest of establishing a co-management plan that would allow them to reintroduce this tool.
The first part is absolutely expected: if you deliberately plant diverse plants to get fruits and nuts, and compare the biodiversity with that of native forests, yes, you’ll get a more diverse “ecosystem”. If you see that as a “healihier” ecosystem because it has more ethnobotanical assets, yes, that is also true. But surely the author doesn’t mean to imply that all North American forest should be turned into “forest gardens” for growing food.
As for controlled burning, yes, that can be useful in replacing natural burns that are no longer permitted, but in the past burns set by indigenous people could become uncontrolled. This was particularly dire in New Zealand, where 40% of native forest (30-35% of the total land area) was burned by Māori people within 200 years of their arrival on the two main islands in the 13th century. (There were of course no non-Polynesian “colonists” then.) See below the fold for more data.
All in all, it’s not an impressive record, and hardly one that enriches modern science. Indeed, modern science is making a large contribution to indigenous people than the other way around. Despite that,
Indigenous knowledge is sacralized and, the article implies, should be considered coequal with modern science. Some quotes:
Rather than dismissing Indigenous knowledge, more western scientists are discovering its viability for themselves and adjusting their research goals to embrace it.
That represents a “massive shift”, according to Kyle Whyte, a professor of environmental justice at the University of Michigan and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Historically, western scientists have considered themselves rigorous and empirical, while they have classified traditional Native thought as mythic, religious or plain made-up, he said.
It’s not false to say that a great deal of “traditional Native thought”, construed as “ways of knowing”, is indeed mythic, religious, or plain made-up. But some of it is not, and insofar as this knowledge can be verified by modern science, that part is indeed “knowledge”.
Western science favors distinct disciplines – ecology, biology, geology and Supernant’s specialty, archaeology. But Indigenous knowledge considers “the earth and the water and the air and the plants and the animals as deeply interdependent and interconnected; to understand one is to understand all. And that has a lot to teach western science,” Supernant said of the importance of braiding these systems.
Notice the inaccurate term “Western science”. And insofar as a system is dependent on other things, modern science has to deal with it. But, as my advisor Dick Lewontin said in an essay called “A reasonable skepticism“:
But this holistic world view is untenable. It is simply another form of mysticism and does not make it possible to manipulate the world for our own benefit. An obscurantist holism has been tried and it has failed. The world is not one huge organism that regulates itself to some good end as the believers in the Gaia hypothesis believe. While in some theoretical sense “the trembling of a flower is felt on the farthest star,” in practice my gardening has no effect on the orbit of Neptune because the force of gravitation is extremely weak and falls off very rapidly with distance. So there is clearly truth in the belief that the world can be broken up into independent parts. But that is not a universal direction for the study of all nature. A lot of nature, as we shall see, cannot be broken up into independent parts to be studied in isolation, and it is pure ideology to suppose that it can.
It is common to say that indigenous knowledge is superior to modern science because the former is more “holistic”. Lewontin shows the fallacy of that claim.
Here’s another common claim you encounter in this kind of literature:
As opportunities for western and Indigenous collaborations multiply, it’s critical that Indigenous people maintain control over any knowledge gleaned and how it’s used, especially in light of western scientists’ historic penchant for extracting information that suited their own purposes and dismissing the rest. “Western science can help, as long as Native people are still decision makers. . . ” [quote from Suzanne Greenlaw, a Native American ecologist]
If this means anything beyond the way that published data is treated in modern science, then it is an unwarranted privilege. When science is published it becomes the property of humanity, and by and large those who produced the knowledge have no control about how it’s used—nor should they. If other people want to use what you’ve published for their own purposes, well, that’s the way science works. Indigenous people should have no more control over any knowledge they make public than should anybody else.
Below we see the implication that indigenous knowledge should be considered coequal with modern science (the quote is from Kisha Supernant “Métis and Papaschase and the director of the University of Alberta’s Institute of Prairie and Indigenous Archaeology”):
What constitutes progress when it comes to braiding western and Indigenous science depends on whom you ask. “If the burden of proof remains on Indigenous communities to demonstrate, using western scientific methods, that their knowledge … is valid, I think we’re not at the place we need to be,” Supernant said. “It is difficult to braid two things together when they’re not given equal weight in the braid.”
Well, I’d say that given the toolkit that’s constitutes modern science and is used to establish “knowledge,” then yes, indigenous people should have to demonstrate that their knowledge really is knowledge in the modern sense before it’s used. When the Māori want to play whale songs to infected kauri trees because whales and kauri trees were once seen as brothers, then they should have to demonstrate the phylogenetic affinity of trees and cetaceans as well as the efficacy of whale songs. (This is a real case based on mytic lore.)
Finally, the bit below strikes me as rather patronizing, treating Indigenous people like children. (“Whyte” is a “professor of environmental justice at the University of Michigan and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.”)
Whyte is encouraged that the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), which seeks to provide scientific evidence to inform government decision-making, included a chapter on Indigenous knowledge in its latest global assessment. But he sees plenty of opportunity for improvements to braiding. For starters, “Indigenous people need to be involved at the earliest stages of research,” he said. And that means western scientists “need to get into the habit of approaching potential [Indigenous] partners and saying ‘I’m interested in water. Are you interested in water?’ before any research questions have been created. Let’s just get excited together about the topic, and plan from the beginning.”
If they plan experiments on indigenous land, or experiments that affect indigenous people, then yes, there should be consultation. But “getting excited together” before any research questions have been formulated is not the way that science works, nor should it. Science is not an endeavor that involves research equity, and creating such equity must be an extracurricular activity. The job of science is to understand the Universe, not to create social justice or spread an ideology.
h/t Ron, Ginger K
Click “continue reading” to see what we know about the damage indigenous North Americans did to the environment. It gives the answer to a question I asked Grok.
Today the Artemis 2 capsule with its four astronauts does its transit around the Moon, going further into space than any human have gone into space. They’ll also see parts of the Moon’s backside that have never been seen by the living human eye, though the backside has been amply photographed.
Shortly after midnight this morning, the capsule entered the Moon’s “sphere of influence,” meaning the part of space where the gravity of the Moon exceeds the gravity of Earth. The schedule is below, and I’ve put a video of the live proceedings below.
They crossed the celestial threshold early Monday morning (April 6), becoming the first people to do so since the crew of Apollo 17, in 1972.
The pull of the moon’s gravity on the Artemis 2 Orion capsule officially became stronger than Earth’s influence on the spcecraft at 12:37 a.m. EDT (0437 GMT), as Orion flew 39,000 miles (62,764 kilometers) above the moon and 232,000 miles (373,368 km) from Earth.
Today, they will break the distance record set by Apollo 13, which flew 248,655 miles (400,171 kilometers) from Earth. Artemis 2 reach that, and then some, but between breaking the record and setting their own, they will have hours of lunar observations to conduct as Orion makes its closest approach to the moon.
Here’s a full breakdown of what to expect today (all times in EDT):
There will be about a 40-minute communications blackout (starting at about 6:47 pm) when they go around the Moon. Here’s today’s schedule:
1 p.m.: NASA lunar flyby coverage begins. 1:56 p.m.: Apollo 13 distance record broken 2:10 p.m.: Crew remarks about record 2:15 p.m.: Crew configures Orion for flyby 2:45 p.m.: Lunar observation period begins 6:47 p.m.: Loss of communications (estimated 40-min.) 7:02 p.m.: Closest approach to the moon 7:05 p.m.: Maximum distance from Earth 8:35 p.m.: Orion enters solar eclipse period 9:20 p.m.: Lunar observation period ends 9:32 p.m.: Solar eclipse period concludes
Watching a bit this morning, I see there is a possible cabin leak, which is worrying, but it may have been a false alarm.
If the video is not working, you can see it on the Space.com site: You can also scroll back and see what was going on previously.
Today’s photo come from reader Jan Malik, who took them in New Jersay. Jan’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.
As an appendix to the earlier Tree Swallow pictures, here are a few more from the New Jersey Botanical Garden. A walk in that park on the first day of spring is a ritual of mine—to ensure all observable phenomena related to spring are happening again and that the thermal death of the Universe is postponed for yet another year.
Red-bellied Woodpecker (Melanerpes carolinus) pausing mid-search for food. This is a female; in this species, the red plumage is restricted to the nape and the area above the bill, whereas males sport a continuous red cap:
Spring Snowflake (Leucojum vernum, possibly var. carpathicum), a Eurasian transplant. It looks succulent, but this perennial defends itself against mammalian browsing by producing bitter, poisonous alkaloids:
Eastern Cottontail (Sylvilagus floridanus) hiding in bearberry brambles. Against this notorious garden destroyer, only the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch offers a true degree of protection:
Forsythia (Genus Forsythia) in bloom—the unmistakable sign that spring has arrived:
White-breasted Nuthatch (Sitta carolinensis). Like the woodpecker, it is a connoisseur of arthropods hiding in bark. however, by being equally adept at feeding head-down or head-up, it finds insects that a woodpecker might miss:
Common Water Strider (likely Aquarius remigis) emerged from its winter hiding. These are predators and scavengers of insects trapped on the surface of slow-flowing streams. As a “true bug,” it has evolved to exploit surface tension. However, surface tension alone doesn’t keep it dry; the secret lies in the dense, hydrophobic hairs on its tarsi. These trap air to act as tiny “dinghies,” preventing the legs from being wetted by capillary action:
Crocus flower (likely a Woodland Crocus, Crocus tommasinianus). The flowers emerge before the leaves, which then die back in late spring after accumulating enough biomass for the year. This adaptation to montane meadows and early forests allows them to bloom early, while withdrawing underground provides a defense against browsing:
Northern Mockingbird (Mimus polyglottos) picking bittersweet fruit (likely the introduced Oriental Bittersweet, Celastrus orbiculatus). The fruit is indeed slightly sweet—a fact I confirmed before spitting it out, as they are reportedly toxic to humans. As they say: don’t try this at home; try it in nature instead:
After the meal, the mockingbird sits quietly in a nearby bush. They mimic other birds’ calls, possibly to fool rivals into thinking a territory is already occupied. It doesn’t work on me, though—I can always tell the original bird from the imitation:
Snowdrop (Genus Galanthus), another Eurasian immigrant. Most of the plants in these pictures were introduced from Eurasia to the Americas; however, with the exception of the Bittersweet, they are generally not considered invasive:
A Jumping Spider. I can’t vouch for the exact ID, but it resembles Phidippus princeps. While not my best shot, it’s worth noting that, like all others in this series, it was taken with a single lens (Canon RF 100-500mm)—a blessing for a lazy photographer.
An Eastern Gray Squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis), looking lean after winter and digging for roots and grubs in the lawn. This species is an unwelcome sight in Europe, where its introduction is displacing the native Red Squirrel. But can we really blame them? They are simply good at being squirrels. It is entirely a human fault that geographical barriers are collapsing. In this “Homogecene” era of a connected world, the total number of species will inevitably decline:
Carbonara (Italian:[karboˈnaːra]) is a pasta dish made with fatty cured pork, hard cheese, eggs, salt, and black pepper. It is typical of the Lazio region of Italy. The dish took its modern form and name in the middle of the 20th century.
A photo of spaghetti carbonara:
Mattes Boch (Mboch on English Wikipedia), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Siamese cats are LOUD. For example, listen to the racket this pair makes when their staff is taking a shower (turn sound up and watch your own cats go nuts—report their reaction in the comments):
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 6 Wikipedia page.
It’s Sunday, April 5, and the thirty-seventh day of Operation Roaring Lion. The global price of oil has reached $109, up seven percent since Friday. Here are the latest developments while you were asleep:
Both crew members of the F-15 shot down over Iran on Friday have been rescued. President Donald Trump called the rescue of the second airman on Saturday night one of the “most daring” operations in U.S. military history, involving dozens of aircraft and hundreds of special forces troops. U.S. forces also destroyed at least one transport aircraft on the ground to prevent it from falling into Iranian hands after it became stranded at a remote site during the mission. They struck Iranian convoys heading toward the search area, and a firefight broke out between U.S. rescuers and Iranian search parties.
The Telegraph reports that five Chinese shipments of sodium perchlorate—a key ingredient in solid missile fuel—have arrived in Iran. China has previously supplied the same chemical to support Iran’s ballistic missile program. The deliveries come even as U.S.-Israeli strikes have specifically targeted Iran’s missile production infrastructure, including fuel and propellant facilities.
U.S.-Israeli forces struck the border crossing between Iran and Iraq for at least the second time since the war began, prompting Iraq to close the crossing. The crossing served as a transit point for at least 1,000 Iraqi proxy fighters now deployed to Basij bases inside Iran—a mobilization analysts believe is partly aimed at suppressing potential domestic unrest.
. . . the president also shared new details about the dramatic rescue of two U.S. airmen whose F-15E was shot down over Iran. Trump said the Friday rescue of the first airman was kept quiet so a search could continue for the second pilot, who was wounded but climbed up to a mountain crevice where he was rescued.
“We didn’t play up the first one, because then they would have found out about the second one,” Trump said. “You know, normally this is not done. When airmen go down, you can’t get them in very tough countries.”
The two pilots were in the same plane but landed a long distance apart because of the speed at which the jet was flying when the airmen evacuated, Trump said.
“Even though they’re only separated by five or six seconds, five or six seconds when you’re going 1000 miles an hour, so that’s many miles, right?” he said.
Here’s the device used by the airman to give US forces his location. (Click on screenshot or here to read more.)
Now, on to the details from INiI:.
Tomorrow, Iran’s extension on Donald Trump’s ultimatum will expire. Last night, Trump reiterated his threat initially made in March: within the next 48 hours, make a deal, open the Strait of Hormuz—or “all hell will rain down” on Iran. Trump’s version of hell, in this case, would look a lot like the real thing: flammable, as Iran’s energy infrastructure is likely in his crosshairs.
In Israel, the assessment is that the regime will allow the ultimatum to expire. So far, few positive signals have come out of Islamabad, where negotiations are supposed to take place. None have even reached the level of vague optimism of “good progress” that came out of the Geneva talks preceding the war. A senior official told Pakistan’s Dawn on Friday that “Tehran has so far not conveyed its readiness to take part in the dialogue.” Reports from The Wall Street Journal tell a similar story: Iran is “unwilling to meet U.S. officials in Islamabad in the coming days and considers U.S. demands unacceptable.”
On March 26, Trump extended Iran’s nuclear negotiation deadline to 10 days, partly because Tehran sent 10 Pakistani-flagged oil tankers as a goodwill gesture. Another delaying gesture is possible—but unlikely. . . .
President Trump threatened to destroy all of Iran’s power plants if the country’s leaders don’t agree to reopen the Strait of Hormuz by Tuesday evening, ratcheting up pressure on Tehran.
“If they don’t come through, if they want to keep it closed, they’re going to lose every power plant and every other plant they have in the whole country,” Trump said in an eight-minute interview with The Wall Street Journal on Sunday.
Pressed on when he thinks the war will end, Trump said, “I will let you know pretty soon.”
“But we are in a position that’s very strong, and that country will take 20 years to rebuild, if they’re lucky, if they have a country,” he said. “And if they don’t do something by Tuesday evening, they won’t have any power plants and they won’t have any bridges standing.”
. . . Asked if he is concerned the people of Iran, a country of 93 million people, could suffer if civilian infrastructure is hit, Trump said, “No, they want us to do it,” arguing that Iranian people are “living in hell.”
In a social-media post on Sunday morning, Trump threatened to destroy Iran’s power plants and bridges on Tuesday if the Strait of Hormuz isn’t reopened. But the post offered few details about how expansive the attacks might be.
Under international law, the military is allowed to strike civilian power plants and other key infrastructure only if it contributes to a military operation and civilian harm is minimized.
The Wall Street Journal previously reported that aides to Trump have said these types of narrowly focused strikes are allowable because they are meant to hamper Tehran’s ability to build missiles, drones and nuclear weapons. Widespread strikes on power plants and bridges, regardless of military value, raise legal and humanitarian questions.
Here’s his threat, with the gravitas and dignity we’re accustomed to from our leader:
Iran is not Gaza, not a country in which the military is deeply embedded in civilian structure, nor one in which the people support the theocracy. If we want regime change, we can’t simply take out all the civilian infrastructure for nothing more than revenge. And that is a war crime.
We cannot soft-soap the damage to the global economy. From that perspective, this war is a catastrophe. It is far more serious than simply an oil shock. Hormuz handled about one-fifth of the global LNG trade in 2025, with no alternative route for most Qatari and Emirati volumes. Conflict-related damage has reduced Qatar’s LNG capacity by 17% for up to five years. Qatar also produces nearly one-third of the world’s helium, and supply disruptions have already begun to impact semiconductor supply chains and significantly increase helium prices. Hormuz transports about 30% of globally traded fertilisers. Fertiliser prices are rising rapidly; FAO’s food price index increased by 2.4% in March, and the IMF warns that poorer countries could face higher food insecurity if the shock continues. J.P. Morgan suggests oil could reach $120 to $130 in the short term, and exceed $150 if disruptions persist into mid-May.
That leaves four plausible options for Trump moving forward (and, of course, Israel—but let us not forget who the junior partner is in this Coalition. Strategy for Israel here is easy: keep bombing things until told by Washington to stop.)
Option one: stop now and declare victory
Financially, this is the most affordable direct US option. It halts the expenditure on sorties, tankers, carriers, munitions, and reduces escalation risk. Politically, it is always accessible because the White House has already set the rhetorical groundwork, with official claims of “clear and unchanging objectives” and a televised assertion that the campaign is on track to conclude “very shortly.” Strategically, however, it leaves the core issue unresolved. The regime would still be in control in Tehran, and Hormuz would remain a point that Tehran can block, ration, or permit. The cost-benefit only makes sense if Washington decides that the domestic value of ending the war now outweighs the strategic humiliation of striking Iran hard without actually re-establishing free navigation.
Option two: keep the air war going at roughly the current level
This is the current situation. US forces have already targeted over 10,000 locations and, according to CENTCOM, destroyed 92% of Iran’s largest naval vessels while significantly reducing missile and drone launch rates. Since then, the pattern has not shifted towards de-escalation but towards coercive punishment. Trump has threatened bridges, power plants, and other infrastructure (even threatening desalination plants—essentially a threat to impose drought on 90 million people heading into a Middle East summer). A major bridge near Tehran-Karaj was hit this week. Financially, this involves ongoing direct military expenses, as well as continued macroeconomic damage from oil, insurance, and freight costs. Strategically, it can further weaken Iran and increase bargaining leverage. However, the benefits are diminishing. Bombing can punish and wear down, but it cannot, on its own, ensure a lasting reopening of Hormuz while Iran retains the capacity to control access and keep markets unsettled.
Option three: escalate with ground troops
This is the most expensive and riskiest option by far. It is the only route that might plausibly try to force Hormuz open, seize islands, or control key maritime points. It also has the highest risk of casualties, political backlash, and prolonged escalation. Current signals strongly oppose it. Rubio stated on 27th March that US aims could be achieved without ground troops and that recent deployments were contingency measures, not plans for invasion. Reuters/Ipsos polling published on Friday shows that over three-quarters of Americans oppose sending American ground troops to Iran. At the UN, even a revised Bahrain-backed resolution on protecting commercial shipping faces Chinese opposition to authorising the use of force, with Russia and France also objecting. Regarding cost and benefits, a ground intervention offers the greatest strategic potential, but the cost would be extraordinary with no guarantee of success.
Option four: strike a deal with the regime
On paper, this represents the most advantageous economic deal. If a settlement genuinely restores shipping, stabilises energy flows, and imposes real limits on missiles or the nuclear programme, it would reduce macroeconomic costs more quickly than any military option. Washington has already submitted a 15-point proposal through intermediaries, and Iran has been reviewing it even as it publicly dismisses direct negotiations. Since then, selective ship passages and Iran’s discussions with Oman about a future Hormuz protocol demonstrate that negotiations over access are ongoing, even if formal talks remain stalled. Strategically, the cost is evident: Trump would need to engage with the very regime he continues to describe as defeated or nearly finished. The benefit is equally clear: a deal is the only feasible way to reopen the Strait without a much larger conflict.
And his assessment of the likelihood:
My analysis, based on the currently available signals, is this: the least likely option is a major ground escalation; the most probable immediate action is continued air strikes and infrastructure coercion; the most likely eventual outcome is a mediated deal that the White House will package as a complete victory. The emergency fallback, if markets and politics worsen more quickly than forecast, is a unilateral ceasefire-and-spin. In brief, the short-term path seems to be option two, with option four as the intended destination.
None of these guarantees, much less makes it likely, that the Iranian people will have a democratic government rather than an oppressive theocracy. And I don’t trust any deal that Iran will abandon its quest for nuclear weapons; it simply cannot be trusted without rigorous and unannounced inspections. This seems unlikely to happen, so yes, option two seems the most likely.
→ You’re getting drafted: Describing our approach to Iran, Pete Hegseth stood before the press and put his hand on a pretend throttle and said: “We’re keeping our hand on that throttle,” clenching the invisible throttle, “as long and as hard as is necessary.” Standing behind him was Trump, who never misses a penis joke, and who simply raised his eyebrows. Unusual self-control. Restraint. Quite presidential not to make a dick joke there, if you ask me.
Also this week, the Army raised the maximum enlistment age from 35 to 42. That’s right, 42! When the ground war with China begins, there will be a draft of middle-aged millennial men begging their platoon leader for the Wi-Fi password so that they can watch Breaking Bad on their iPads. I see this lasting about two weeks. See, 52-year-old Gen-X men would be better fighters than the millennials.
→ Just for a little taste of the streets: You should probably know what is being said in those fun progressive pro-peace protests happening all over the place. Here’s a great example from a protest in Philadelphia this week. A man stands in front of a boisterous crowd: “Until we have done everything in our power to bring the United States to its knees, let us not lose sight of the enemy!” Okay, me too, peace and love,man. He continues: “For every U.S. soldier who comes back in a casket, we cheer!” The crowd cheers.
He also says: “Hamas, Hezbollah, Ansar Allah, all of the resistance forces we celebrate. These popular forces on the ground spend every waking moment in direct confrontation with Zionism and they rely on a strong Iranian state to maintain their fighting capacity.”
→ Wrong place, wrong headline: A Venezuelan migrant who was allegedly detained at the border in 2023 but released into the U.S. has been charged with murdering 18-year-old Loyola University Chicago freshman Sheridan Gorman. She was shot in the back along the lakefront. Hmm. That’s a little too perfect for the Republican narrative. Is there any way we can blame the student for being shot? Chicago electeds and local media are trying.
Chicago alderwoman Maria Hadden said it sounded like Gorman was in the “wrong place, wrong time,” and that the victim and her friends “might’ve startled this person,” i.e., the shooter. When I get startled I usually commit first-degree murder too. Wrong place, wrong time. Someone made a lot of mistakes, and it’s Sheridan Gorman, who is dead. No other mistakes here. No one else in the “wrong” anything.
In fact, the only mistake acknowledged was that of Loyola University Chicago’s student newspaper, which apologized for having called the accused killer of freshman Sheridan Gorman an “illegal immigrant” in a subsequently deleted Instagram post. I’m a lefty here, truly. Like, I believe in mass amnesty. But if someone shoots into a crowd and kills a girl, we do not blame the girl simply because she’s the citizen and he’s the immigrant. . .
I was amazed at how the local media tried to blame the victim for her own shooting. And that, of course, is that the alleged killer was an undocumented immigrant, a status considered sacred by progressives.
The San Diego Zoo Safari Park announced its four male cheetah cubs, born in January, now have names: Nyasi, Owadgi, Ohani and Nkala.
First-time mother Kelechi gave birth to the cubs on Jan. 24, becoming the first cheetah to give birth at the zoo since 2020.
Here are the cheetos:
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili i referring to the d*g now owned by the upstairs lodgers:
Hili: These steps have lost their entire charm.
Andrzej: Maybe with time they will recover it once more.
In Polish:
Hili: Te schodki straciły cały urok.
Ja: Być może z czasem odzyskają go ponownie.
*******************
The cover of the University of Chicago magazine shows Botany Pond with ducks in it next to Erman Hall, where students who should be doing science are sitting at their computers. And the ducks are white Pekin ducks, not wild mallards. Well, you can’t have everything. There’s an article on the renovated pond that mentions the ducks, but leaves out the Duckmeister because Facilities doesn’t like him. Eventually that story will be up here.
Masih criticizzes Trump for hurting the people of Iran by threatening to bomb them into the Stone Age and falsely promising help.
We are going to send Iran back to the Stone Age?
President @realDonaldTrump! Stop targeting ordinary Iranians and Iran’s infrastructure, the Islamic regime’s officials you call “less radical leaders” in Iran, the ones you are willing to negotiate with are exactly the ones with a… pic.twitter.com/xVSFwyzhHP
From Luana; the article with the data (from Finland) are in the link:
“Among adolescents who underwent medical gender reassignment, psychiatric morbidity increased markedly during follow-up—rising from 9.8% to 60.7% in feminising gender re-assignment and from 21.6% to 54.5% in masculinising gender reassignment.”
Ruuska 2026 https://t.co/iJ6gBLwrgA
From Brian, a “math clock” (there are others in the thread:
One of the best tests of an AI is the “Clock Test” prompt I developed. Below are results from Grok (left) and from ChatGPT (right). Can your AI do better?
Prompt: “Draw a math clock. It looks like a traditional clock with hands; however, instead of 12 numbers on the clock… pic.twitter.com/IBkLZ8pTsj
This Yugoslavian Jewish boy was gassed as soon as he arrived in Auschwitz. He was three years old, and would be 85 today if he had lived. https://t.co/KJRosA52tT
And two from Dr. Cobb: First, more explanation of that famous Earth photo taken by Artemis II:
You'll have seen this – Earth from #Artemis II en-route to the Moon.But look again – it's Earth's *nightside*, lit by the near-full Moon, not the Sun 🌕️The aurorae, airglow, stars, & city lights in Europe, Africa, & the Americas give the game away. Cool.NASA/Reid Wiseman#Space #Photography
