7 July 2025
Unwilling to stay silent, 139 employees of the Environmental Protection Agency signed a letter listing 5 criticisms of Administrator Lee Zeldin’s actions:
- Undermining public trust
- Ignoring scientific consensus to benefit polluters
- Reversing EPA’s progress in America’s most vulnerable communities
- Dismantling the Office of Research and Development
- Promoting a culture of fear; forcing staff to choose between their livelihood and their well-being
The EPA’s response was to suspend the signers and falsely denigrate them as “career bureaucrats unlawfully undermining, sabotaging, and undercutting the administration’s agenda as voted for by the great people of this country last November.”
You and i must continue standing up for science, integrity, compassion.
SPACE
We’ve spotted another visitor from beyond the Solar System. Because Comet 3I/ATLAS is moving at 60 kps, it will easily escape from the Sun’s gravity and continue on into interstellar space. It could be as large as 24 km across. [“Rendezvous with Rama” was one of my favorite books.]
Satellite insurance?? Yes, because the rocket might fail to deliver the satellite to its planned orbit, or the satellite might collide with some other satellite (collision insurance??), or the satellite could be shredded by orbiting debris. Last year for the first time, insurance payouts exceeded collective insurance premiums. Insurers are dropping out of the market. Sounds a bit like the home insurance market in California.
Here is a 24-page e-booklet from the SETI Institute describing the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
A space elevator to assist in launching payloads from Earth is not yet technologically possible. But a space elevator anchored to the Moon is possible and it would facilitate exploration and mining operations. This web page includes a 15-minute video by one of the scientists who verified its feasibility.
For fun, take this 10-question quiz about galaxies.
SCIENCE-BASED SKEPTICISM
A friend of mine firmly believes in the Pleiadeans – blond blue-eyed beings from a higher dimension who are shepherding us through ‘these difficult times.’ Roughly a third of Americans believe we are being visited by aliens from far-distant stars or from other dimensions, and over half believe our government knows more than they are telling. A concerning fallout from this nonsense is the growing distrust of governments and scientists.
Tom Nichols in his book, “The Death of Expertise”, claims “Americans have reached a point where ignorance, especially of anything related to public policy, is an actual virtue.”
Not surprisingly, the business model used by social media platforms exacerbates the spreading of misinformation.
On a positive note, sales of homeopathic ‘remedies’ are declining, and British secondary students are better at identifying ‘fake news’ than are their parents.
PHYSICS
Space-time is at the root of gravity and our understanding of the cosmos, but is space-time an emergent phenomenon of a deeper reality? To understand how physicists are exploring the underpinnings of space-time, Quanta Magazine produced this 9-part survey.
BIOLOGY / ETHOLOGY
Twenty-nine years ago, Dolly the sheep was born. Dolly matured using DNA of a somatic cell of breast tissue (hence named after Dolly Parton) from one ewe , inserted into an enucleated egg cell [oocyte] of a second ewe, and implanted into the womb of a third ewe. Dolly had no genetic father. This year for the first time, healthy adult mice each matured using the haploid genomes of two mouse sperm cells inserted into a mouse enucleated egg cell, and implanted into the womb of another mouse. These male mice have no genetic mother; only fathers.
Ninety-nine million years ago, a number of wasps were trapped and preserved in amber. What makes them peculiar are posterior flaps lined with spikes apparently adapted for trapping bugs. Like Venus Fly Traps, the wasps could trap living prey.
FUN (?) NERDY VIDEOS
Discovering 2,104 New Asteroids – Rubin Observatory – 1 min
California Water Conservation – New York Times – Michael Kimmelman – 2.5 mins
Insects: A Gustatory Delight – Show & Tell – Joe Schwarcz – 4 mins
Psychological Signature of the Extreme Mind – Leor Zmigrod – 5.5 mins
Reforestation Does Not Begin with Planting Trees – SciShow – Stefan Chin – 8 mins
Flying Past Every Galaxy in Our Observable Universe – King RS – 11 mins
The Dinosaurs Too Big to Be Dinosaurs – PBS Eons – Kallie Moore – 13 mins
Chirality: The Mystery of Life’s Asymmetry – Quanta Magazine – 13.5 mins
First Images from Rubin Observatory – Dr. Becky – Becky Smethurst – 18 mins
A Zero-Emissions Journey – The Visioneers – Jay Harding – 20 mins
Terraforming Mars – Fraser Cain & Erika DeBenedictis – 54 mins
Tracing the Birth of Mammals – SLICE Full Doc – 50 mins
Plutonium – Tales from the Periodic Table – Ron Hipschmann – 60 mins
What is String Theory? – StarTalk – Neil deGrasse Tyson, Chuck Nice, Lara Anderson – 63 mins
Have a fun, rewarding week while standing up for science, empathy, and yourself,
Dave Almandsmith, Bay Area Skeptics
“Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?”
Abraham Lincoln (1809 – 1865)
Re “British secondary students are better at identifying ‘fake news’ than are their parents”:
‘Fake news’ in the article refers to “scientific disinformation and unintentional misinformation” and not Donald Trump’s definition of ‘fake news” — any factual statement he disagrees with.
When television arrived in my home in the early 1950s, I frequently asked my father “Is that true?” or words to that effect after seeing a tv advertisement. I am sure I asked that question after initially hearing him express skepticism in response to tv advertisements. But I can’t recall either of us expressing skepticism about the accuracy of tv news. Were we naive or was tv news more or less accurate? In those days the equivalent of ‘fake news’ was found in publications like the CPUSA’s “Daily Worker.” But we didn’t call it fake news; we called it propaganda.