Abbott signed it

 

Texas has passed and signed into law a bill that will open the door to the government having more "oversight" (i.e., control) over what state universities can teach.

Yeah. Thought control, here we come. The best way to maintain political power is to teach each generation that your party is the one that's supposed to have it.

Weirdly enough, I could only find one article confirming that it was signed, but several articles about how bad it would be if it became law.  Here's the one about the signing, from Forbes (if you go there, you'll lose your one of your quota of five free articles for the month, but hey, it's near the end of the month). 

Texas Governor Signs Bill That Throttles Public University Senates

Since I haven't read that, here's one you can read that discusses why this is a pretty bad development in the higher levels of education in the Lone Star State.

Testimony Against SB 37

"Under SB 37, university regents, currently appointed by the Governor with the advice and consent of the senate, would have the power to overturn campus administrative decisions and individually approve faculty job postings. This egregious micromanagement of academic institutions erodes decades-deep trust built among faculty and university administration who champion shared governance. These changes transform governing boards from strategic overseers to enforcers of the governor’s will by further consolidating power over institution curricula into the hands of Governor Abbott’s appointees. Institutions of higher learning are not meant to be politicized mechanisms of government control. SB 37 enables politicians to undermine educator expertise in ways that threaten the global standing of our “universities of the first class.” Further, the requirements for university leadership hiring would deter the most qualified candidates from applying to avoid the public scrutiny and political interference that already plague hiring processes in Texas."

Put down the cookies

 

If you're feeling angst, or anxiety, or nervousness, or concerns, or slightly scared about the oncoming world catastrophe of climate change, I have news for you.

Your body fat is making you feel that way.

So, if you want to munch on something other than popcorn (and with less butter) that has lots of calories, I would counsel taking small bites.

Molecular Connection Found Between Body Fat and Anxiety
New research has uncovered a link between adipose tissue, a hormone called GDF15, and anxiety.

"The research team discovered that psychological stress, which triggers the fight or flight response, initiates a process called lipolysis in fat cells. This process leads to the release of fats, which in turn stimulate the release of a hormone called GDF15 from immune cells found in the fat tissue. GDF15 then communicates with the brain, resulting in anxiety. Researchers came to their conclusion through a series of meticulously designed experiments involving mice. Behavioral tests assessed anxiety-like behavior, and molecular analyses identified the activated pathways. A clear connection between metabolic changes in adipose tissue and anxiety was established, offering new insights into the interplay between metabolism and mental health."

So --  you get stressed, your body's metabolic demands go up, and the body release fat to burn to help with those demands. But that also releases a hormone that goes to the brain and makes it anxious. Which would make you stressed, and that means elevated metabolic demands, and at some point you need cookies.

So you have more fat to release when you get stressed.  It all makes sense, right?

Enjoy.

I'm going somewhere with this

 

I'm going somewhere with this, and with the recent set of posts featuring pictures of beautiful women.

So, in this post, I ask you to judge (and I don't know the answer for 100% certain):

Is the woman who is shown in the pictures on this Instagram profile a real woman, or an AI creation?

Vanessa Christine

(I think this one's pretty easy.  But as I lead up to the point of this, they will get more difficult.)

A selection of pictures. I haven't included ones that would make the decision go one way or the other. More on that soon.

Exactly, leave it to the experts

 

This was a great column by Monica Hesse in the Washington Post. Unfortunately, I can only provide excerpts of it here.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shows the fallacy of ‘doing your own research’
Has he even looked into the origins of the phrase?

"Unless, of course, what Kennedy meant by “do your own research” was “faff around on the internet until you find someone saying something you like,” in which case, sure. You can probably knock that out in an afternoon.

“Do your own research” is an insidious phrase. It’s the brother of “just asking questions,” the cousin of “for argument’s sake.” It sounds objectively neutral. Nobody is saying you should believe their research, just your own — nobody is pushing an agenda. But it is based on an unspoken shared understanding that the official story is suspect. That research by experts is a scam. That there are things that nobody wants you to know. In 2023, University of Wisconsin-Madison and University of Michigan researchers published a study that found that when people felt positively about “doing their own research,” they were more likely to believe misinformation about the pandemic and to mistrust scientific institutions in general."

You don't say. 

Monica also says this:

"I wasn’t sure, when I started writing this column, whether my goal was going to be to take a swipe at RFK Jr. — a nepo baby wastrel who is busy promising to Make America Healthy Again while cutting back HHS programs that assist minority and underserved populations — or whether it was going to be to trace the linguistic history of a four-word phrase — a phrase that sounds like a celebration of intellectual exploration and is really an invitation to divorce yourself from reality and then lash out at the people who try to bring you back."

There's a whole lot of bad research out there too in the social media world, done by people who are assuming the conclusion and then finding a way to "analyze" the data so it bears that conclusion out. Some of them are glib and convincing about it, with a modicum of education that lends them veracity. (Sadly, a whole lot of this bad research pertains to climate change.)

It doesn't make them right. Sadly, they find an audience that wants to believe them, and commonly does.

The loss of our trust in experts is a loss for all of us, and it's causing an increasing amount of problems.  I still trust the experts -- and in some fields, I am one.

Now, here's a good short article to consult.

In quest of quality: 9 ways to assess scientific accuracy

There's a nice conclusion here:

"Summing everything up, know that it’s totally okay to have a difference of opinion with your great-uncle Leslie. However, remember that spreading misinformation can be harmful. Be aware of author bias and transparency and appraise all the data before reaching conclusions. So, keep an open mind, keep it objective, and keep it honest. You’re on your way towards becoming an informed judge of quality science."

When life is tough, women are tougher (than men)

 

Now, it doesn't take much to convince me that women are tougher than man. After all, women give birth. Men have kidney stones in their urinary ducts. Not quite the same.

So, the results of this study shouldn't be too much of a surprise.

Are Women More Metabolically Efficient Under Extreme Conditions?
Findings from an Arctic winter expedition indicate greater metabolic efficiency in women under such extreme conditions.

"Strength, power, speed, and endurance are typically between 10% and 30% greater in males compared to females. However, recent work suggests a shrinking reduction in the performance gap between the sexes as the distance and/or duration increases. Here we address this important issue in our recent study. Using the doubly labeled water method, we reported lower total energy expenditure relative to load carriage in women compared to men during the Alaska Mountain Wilderness Ski Classic – a remote and unsupported 200km Arctic winter expedition. These findings indicate greater metabolic efficiency in women under such extreme conditions."

Reference:  

Coker MS, Ravelli MN, Shriver TC, et al. Sex-specific energy expenditure during the Alaska mountain wilderness ski classic; insights from an Arctic winter expedition. Front Physiol. 2025;16:1543834. doi: 10.3389/fphys.2025.1543834

But hey, we always knew they were tough.

That one might leave a mark

 

Neutrinos.

They are very weird.

They can pass through a lot of matter without interacting with any of it. To make observations of neutrinos, researchers have resorted to putting detectors in deep mines or deep underwater so that the matter screens out everything else, leaving just the neutrinos to OCCASIONALLY interact with the detector elements.

They are, in terms that aren't exactly accurate physics, very low mass (but they aren't massless). Despite that, hey can pack a lot of energy.

For more information, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory has this site: What's a neutrino?

So, speaking of a lot of energy, this one did pack a wallop (and amazingly enough, it was detected, too):

The Most Energetic Neutrino Ever Seen Makes a Mediterranean Splash
A “ghost particle” discovered by a detector in the Mediterranean carried 30 times more energy than any neutrino observed to date

"This [neutrino] one’s discovery and characterization comes from a predominantly European collaboration dubbed KM3NeT, a sprawling neutrino telescope that is still under construction and that, once fully built, will use about a cubic kilometer of instrument-laced Mediterranean seawater as the basis of its two distinct detectors. Yet even in its incomplete state, the project has delivered a stunning result—a neutrino that likely hails from beyond the galaxy and that contains unprecedented power.

“It’s in a completely unexplored region of energy, 30 times higher than any previous observation of neutrinos,” said Paschal Coyle, a neutrino physicist at the French National Center for Scientific Research and a member of the KM3NeT team, during a press conference about the research that was held on Tuesday."

Here's a link to the actual paper about it:

Observation of an ultra-high-energy cosmic neutrino with KM3NeT

Since I can't snow a picture of a neutrino (that would be difficult, though there is an illustration of the event in the paper), I'll show a picture of the KM3NeT detectors.

It's a new blue!

 

This is a great article about a really interesting development in the world of optics and photonics about a new color. It's so new and exciting that I'm posting links to TWO articles about this colorful story.

(Well, you know I was going to try for something like that.)

Scientists Trick The Eye Into Seeing New Color 'Olo'

"But using a new technique called “Oz,” scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have found a way to manipulate the human eye into seeing a brand-new color — a blue-green color of unparalleled saturation that the research team has named “olo.”

“It was like a profoundly saturated teal … the most saturated natural color was just pale by comparison,” said Austin Roorda, a professor of optometry and vision science at UC Berkeley’s Herbert Wertheim School of Optometry & Vision Science, and one of the creators of Oz."

A Precisely Pointed Laser Allows People To See New Color ‘Olo’

"This week, researchers reported in the journal Science Advances that by using precisely aimed laser light, they were able to selectively target just one of the three types of color-sensing cones in the human retina. The cone, dubbed “M” because it responds to medium wavelengths of light, is normally stimulated at the same time as cones that respond to longer wavelength reddish light, or shorter wavelength bluish light. But after mapping the location of the cones in several subjects’ eyes, the researchers were able to target just the M cones with one specific wavelength of green laser light—a condition that would never exist in nature. The result, they say, is a highly saturated bluish-green teal color unlike anything in the real world. The researchers named their new color “olo.”

So, nothing to LOL about, it's olo.

Supposedly, the picture/image below is a reasonable facsimile.