Alter (2004), Robert, The Five Books of Moses, W. W.Norton 2004 ' Through a distinguished career of critical scholarship and translation, Robert Alter has equipped ua to read thr Hebrew Bible as a powerful cohesive work of literature. In this landmark work, Alter's masterly translation and probing commentary combine to give contemporary readers the definitive edition of the Five Books of Moses. 
Amazon   back

Dawkins (2006), Richard, The God Delusion, Houghton Mifflin 2006 Amazon Editorial Review From Publishers Weekly 'The antireligion wars started by Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris will heat up even more with this salvo from celebrated Oxford biologist Dawkins. For a scientist who criticizes religion for its intolerance, Dawkins has written a surprisingly intolerant book, full of scorn for religion and those who believe. But Dawkins, who gave us the selfish gene, anticipates this criticism. He says it's the scientist and humanist in him that makes him hostile to religions—fundamentalist Christianity and Islam come in for the most opprobrium—that close people's minds to scientific truth, oppress women and abuse children psychologically with the notion of eternal damnation. While Dawkins can be witty, even confirmed atheists who agree with his advocacy of science and vigorous rationalism may have trouble stomaching some of the rhetoric: the biblical Yahweh is "psychotic," Aquinas's proofs of God's existence are "fatuous" and religion generally is "nonsense." The most effective chapters are those in which Dawkins calms down, for instance, drawing on evolution to disprove the ideas behind intelligent design. In other chapters, he attempts to construct a scientific scaffolding for atheism, such as using evolution again to rebut the notion that without God there can be no morality. He insists that religion is a divisive and oppressive force, but he is less convincing in arguing that the world would be better and more peaceful without it.' Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 
Amazon   back

Nicholls (2025), Jeffrey, Cognitive Cosmogenesis: A systematic unification of physics and theology, Austin Macauley Publishers 2025 ' This book is a personal narrative of those events and a defense of the belief that the universe itself is divine. The central argument is that by embracing this reality and abandoning notions of supernatural deities, humanity can resolve its problems. The universe, it is argued, is self-creating, and a proper understanding of physics leads to a plausible scientific theology. The natural intelligence inherent in the universe, from cellular organization to ecosystems, far surpasses any artificial intelligence. Comprehending this natural order, the author suggests, would make achieving world peace relatively straightforward. The book contends that modern theologians should recognize the physical world, rather than ancient texts, as the foundation for credible theology. It also addresses the historical entanglement of religion and politics, asserting that the model of creation presented herein fundamentally rejects the imperialistic ambitions that have fueled genocidal holy wars.'  
Amazon   back

Albigensian Crusade - Wikipedia, Albigensian Crusade - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The Albigensian Crusade (French: Croisade des albigeois), also known as the Cathar Crusade (1209–1229), was a military and ideological campaign initiated by Pope Innocent III to eliminate Catharism in Languedoc, what is now southern France. The Crusade was prosecuted primarily by the French crown and promptly took on a political aspect. It resulted in the significant reduction of practicing Cathars and a realignment of the County of Toulouse with the French crown. The distinct regional culture of Languedoc was also diminished. [. . .]
From 1209 to 1215, the Crusaders experienced great success, capturing Cathar lands and systematically crushing the movement. From 1215 to 1225, a series of revolts caused many of the lands to be regained by the counts of Toulouse. A renewed crusade resulted in the recapturing of the territory and effectively drove Catharism underground by 1244. The Albigensian Crusade had a role in the creation and institutionalization of both the Dominican Order and the Medieval Inquisition. The Dominicans promulgated the message of the Church and spread it by preaching the Church's teachings in towns and villages to stop the spread of heresies, while the Inquisition investigated people who were accused of teaching heresies. Because of these efforts, all discernible traces of the Cathar movement were eradicated by the middle of the 14th century. Some historians consider the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars an act of genocide. back

Antoine Adamantidis et al., Optogenetics: 10 years after ChR2 in neurons—views from the community, 'Neuroscientists have long dreamed of the ability to control neuronal activity with exquisite spatiotemporal precision. In this issue, we celebrate the tenth anniversary of a paper published in the September 2005 issue of Nature Neuroscience by a team led by Karl Deisseroth (Nat. Neurosci. 8, 1263–1268 (2005)). In this study, the authors expressed a light-sensitive microbial protein, Channelrhodopsin-2 (ChR2), in neurons and showed that exposing these neurons to pulses of light could activate them in a temporally precise and reliable manner. In the decade since this paper, 'optogenetic' approaches have been widely and enthusiastically adopted by the field and applied to a vast array of questions both in neuroscience and beyond.
In the intervening years, improvements to early techniques have provided the community with an optogenetics tool box that has opened the door to experiments we could have once only dreamed of. Controlling neuronal activity in real time, we now have the ability to determine causality between activity patterns in specific neuronal circuits and brain function and behavior, enabling researchers to definitively test long-held views and advance our understanding of brain function in both health and disease.
Anniversaries are often a time to reflect and, in light of the seminal influence this technique has had on neuroscience, we were curious to know how researchers in the field feel the advances in optogenetic approaches have influenced their work, what they think the future holds in terms of the application of these techniques and what they see as the obstacles we need to overcome to get there. Toward this end, we've asked a number of scientists to share their thoughts with us in this Q&A. Although we weren't able to ask more than a small fraction of the field, their answers give an exciting view of the power and potential of optogenetic approaches for understanding, and even potentially repairing, the nervous system.' back

Aquinas, Summa I, 25, 3, Is God omnipotent?, '. . . God is called omnipotent because He can do all things that are possible absolutely; which is the second way of saying a thing is possible. For a thing is said to be possible or impossible absolutely, according to the relation in which the very terms stand to one another, possible if the predicate is not incompatible with the subject, as that Socrates sits; and absolutely impossible when the predicate is altogether incompatible with the subject, as, for instance, that a man is a donkey.' back

Aquinas, Summa: I, 2, 3, Does God exist?, 'I answer that, The existence of God can be proved in five ways. The first and more manifest way is the argument from motion. . . . ' back

Araneta-Alana, Peel, Hicks & Varrall, Australia’s top court puts fossil fuel developers on notice, ' Australia’s highest court has just delivered its first-ever decision in a climate case. And it could sour the economic argument for developing new coal and gas projects in New South Wales, and possibly Australia.
This High Court judgement is timely – Australia is co-hosting an international pre-COP31 climate summit in the Pacific this week and is facing renewed pressure from Pacific leaders over fossil fuel projects.
The court’s decision on Wednesday – in a case brought by a community group against mining company MACH Energy over a coalmine expansion – is not a unified legal declaration against fossil fuels.
But this restrained, technical judgement quietly sets a new standard for coal and gas projects in the state – and potentially across the country. It means planning authorities must consider the whole carbon footprint of these projects, including the emissions produced by customers burning these fossil fuels overseas.
Although the decision concerns one specific coal mine – MACH Energy’s Mount Pleasant coal mine in NSW – it directly affects the 17 other coal proposals currently in the state’s planning pipeline.
It could also provide a legal blueprint for how courts across the country handle future cases against fossil fuel projects
back

Associatd Press (2026_08_22), Israel Will Investigate Hind Rajab's Killing; Her Mother Wants More, ' The mother of a 5-year-old Palestinian girl who was killed after Israeli forces fired on her family's car in Gaza City wants an independent inquiry into her death, saying an Israeli military investigation announced this week is insufficient.
The widely publicized recording of Hind's January 2024 phone call with her mother and emergency dispatchers made her one of the Israel-Hamas war's most prominent casualties.
Israel's military this week admitted to firing at the family's car as it fled an Israeli invasion and firing toward an ambulance dispatched to help them.
It said it would launch a criminal investigation into its troops' conduct. All six people in the car and two paramedics were killed. But both Rajab's family and emergency responders from the Palestinian Red Crescent Society doubt the Israeli investigation can deliver justice.
"Why did the investigation and the acknowledgment of the shooting at Hind's car and at the paramedics come only after more than two years?" Hamada said in an interview with The Associated Press. "It's an attempt to distract from what's happening in Gaza and improve the [Israeli] army's image to the world. That's it".' back

Begley, Toscano & Newling (2026_10_07), ‘Pandora’s box’: High Court decision could reopen coal mine approval cases, 'Environment Minister Murray Watt said the government was still considering the 111-page judgment handed down on Wednesday, while casting doubt on the idea of a new national precedent.
But the federal opposition is demanding that the Albanese government intervene should the NSW Labor government fail to urgently pass new laws, a call also seized upon by One Nation.[. . .]>br> As one of the world’s largest exporters of coal, gas and iron ore, Australia’s so-called scope three emissions – the greenhouse gases released when customers across the world burn or process those products – dwarf the domestic emissions from mining and drilling.
Environmentalists hailed Wednesday’s ruling. “When Australian coal is burnt overseas, the climate damage doesn’t magically disappear at the port,” the Greens’ new deputy federal leader Steph Hodgins-May said.
Anita O’Hart, a lawyer for the environmental group fighting the project, called the victory “a groundbreaking decision for climate law in Australia” that would be studied closely by other countries.[. . .]
Previously, Australian courts have accepted that the responsibility for emissions caused by the end use of fossil fuels lies only with the emitter, according to Grattan Institute senior fellow Tony Wood. The Mount Pleasant decision now opened a “Pandora’s box of messy questions” for proponents of new emissions-intensive resource projects and planning authorities, especially in NSW, Wood said. [. . .]
But former Greens leader Adam Bandt, now the head of the Australian Conservation Foundation, said the High Court ruling was “a recognition of the science, something that the governments and corporations have fought for a while".' back

Bhuiyan, Kerr & Robins-Early (2025_10_11), Inside tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s off-the-record lectures about the antichrist, ' Peter Thiel, the billionaire political svengali and tech investor, is worried about the antichrist. It could be the US. It could be Greta Thunberg.
Over the past month, Thiel has hosted a series of four lectures on the downtown waterfront of San Francisco philosophizing about who the antichrist could be and warning that Armageddon is coming. Thiel, who describes himself as a “small-o orthodox Christian”, believes the harbinger of the end of the world could already be in our midst and that things such as international agencies, environmentalism and guardrails on technology could quicken its rise. It is a remarkable discursion that reveals the preoccupations of one of the most influential people in Silicon Valley and the US.
“A basic definition of the antichrist: some people think of it as a type of very bad person. Sometimes it’s used more generally as a spiritual descriptor of the forces of evil,” Thiel said, kicking off his first lecture. “What I will focus on is the most common and most dramatic interpretation of antichrist: an evil king or tyrant or anti-messiah who appears in the end times.”
Thiel was on the forefront of conservative politics long before the rest of Silicon Valley took a rightward turn with Donald Trump’s second term as president. He’s had close ties to Trump for nearly a decade, is credited with catapulting JD Vance into the office of vice-president, and is bankrolling Republicans’ 2026 midterm campaigns. Making his early fortune as a co-founder of PayPal, he has personally contributed to Facebook as its first outside investor, as well as to SpaceX, OpenAI and more through his investment firm, Founders Fund. Palantir, which he co-founded, has won government contracts worth billions to create software for the Pentagon, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) and the National Health Service in the UK. Now, with more attention and political pull than ever, the billionaire is looking to spread his message about the antichrist, though he is better known for his savvy politics and investments than his contributions to theology.' back

Cory Alpert (2026_10_09), With war project, US tech ecosystem is beginning to look a lot like China’s, The US is moving towards a fusion of the government and the military-industrial complex – the Chinese model from the opposite direction The world’s wealthiest man has just been appointed to a Pentagon commission that will help decide what the future of warfare looks like. Elon Musk, alongside Anduril Industries co-founder Palmer Luckey and former House speaker Newt Gingrich, is to lead “Project Meridian”. It follows a strategy by this White House that moves government and the tech sector ever closer.
Project Meridian goes much further than the influence of defence contractors in Washington. It marks the beginning of Silicon Valley arriving at the halls of power, where the future of warfare itself is being imagined.
The post-war years have been marked by an ever-closer relationship between American defence contractors and the government. This was exactly the convergence president Dwight Eisenhower warned against in his 1961 farewell address.
Even with the revolving door between industry and government, and billion-dollar lobbying efforts, the structure of the relationship was clear: government would set the direction and contractors would bid to enact it.[. . .]
The dawn of the age of artificial intelligence (AI) created a new part of the global defence economy, a booming sector of companies that carry as much DNA from Silicon Valley as from traditional weapons manufacturers.[. . . ]
At this intersection, they find the old dependence on state contracts for their growth clashes with Silicon Valley’s belief that they should be the ones building the future. As Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel put it: anyone opposing these “disrupters” view of the future of AI is tantamount to the Antichrist. To him, it is a mortal sin to put guardrails on the new world being built. In the pursuit of ambition, this new sector has shed its old libertarian ethos and instead doubled down on its belief that rapid, unencumbered advancement should override any checks on its power. With Project Meridian, that has been given force. Two tech leaders whose companies hold billions of dollars in Pentagon contracts are now tasked with defining what the future of warfare will require – and thus stand to benefit from it.' back

Crusades - Wikipedia, Crusades - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The Crusades were a series of intermittent military campaigns in the years from 1096 to 1487, sanctioned by various Popes. In 1095 the Byzantine Emperor, Alexios I, sent an ambassador to Pope Urban II requesting military support in the Byzantines' conflict with the westward migrating Turks in Anatolia. The Pope responded by calling Catholics to join what later became known as the First Crusade. One of Urban's stated aims was to guarantee pilgrims access to the holy sites in the Holy Land that were under Muslim control while his wider strategy was to reunite the Eastern and Western branches of Christendom, divided after their split in 1054, and establish himself as head of the united Church. This initiated a complex 200-year struggle in the region.' back

European wars of religion - Wikipedia, European war of religion - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The European wars of religion were waged in Europe during the 16th, 17th and early 18th centuries. Fought after the Protestant Reformation began in 1517, the wars disrupted the religious and political order in the Catholic countries of Europe. Other motives during the wars involved revolt, territorial ambitions and great power conflicts. By the end of the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), Catholic France had allied with the Protestant forces against the Catholic Habsburg monarchy. The wars were largely ended by the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which established a new political order that is now known as Westphalian sovereignty.
The conflicts began with the minor Knights' War (1522–1523), followed by the larger German Peasants' War (1524–1525) in the Holy Roman Empire. Warfare intensified after the Catholic Church began the Counter-Reformation against the growth of Protestantism in 1545. The conflicts culminated in the Thirty Years' War, which devastated Germany and killed one third of its population. The Peace of Westphalia broadly resolved the conflicts by recognising three separate Christian traditions in the Holy Roman Empire: Roman Catholicism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism.Smaller religious wars continued to be waged in Western Europe until the 1710s, including the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639–1651) in the British Isles, the Savoyard–Waldensian wars (1655–1690), and the Toggenburg War (1712) in the Western Alps.' back

Guardian (2024_03_03), Editorial: The Guardian view on Patriarch Kirill’s support for Putin’s war: betraying the faith, ' Following the Julian rather than the Gregorian calendar, the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) celebrates Easter this weekend – the most important religious festival of its liturgical year. One priest who will not be leading a service is Dmitry Safronov, a prominent Moscow cleric. In March, Mr Safronov presided over a memorial service at the grave of Alexei Navalny, following the dissident’s death in unexplained circumstances in an Arctic penal colony. He was subsequently suspended from the priesthood for three years and can no longer preach or wear a cassock. [. . .]
A near-contemporary of Mr Putin who allegedly also worked for the KGB, the leader of the Moscow Patriarchate views the war as a spiritual cause, and is one of its most relentless propagandists. In well‑publicised sermons and a weekly broadcast on state television, Kirill has – in the words of one Orthodox academic – given Mr Putin’s “Russian world” irredentism “a metaphysical, eschatological and messianic spin”. With dissenting voices such as Father Safronov ruthlessly silenced, the ROC has become the religious wing of the Kremlin’s war machine.' back

Kate Cantrell (2026_10_09), ‘A hard, hard book to write’: Magda Szubanski on trauma, cancer and the cost of coming out‘A hard, hard book to write’: Magda Szubanski on trauma, cancer and the cost of coming out, Review: I Can’t Tell You But I Will – Magda Szubanski (Text Publishing) 'Magda Szubanski is a misfit. She knows it, she owns it and she wears it. And that’s why Australians love her. Best known for her role as netball tragic Sharon Strzelecki on Kath & Kim, Szubanski has twice been voted the country’s most trusted celebrity. But she’s also a formidable author. In 2016, Szubanski’s first memoir, Reckoning, won Best Biography of the Year at the Australian Book Industry Awards.
That memoir, which took eight years to write, centres on her relationship with her father, a Polish assassin who served in a top-secret counterintelligence unit during the second world war. “If you had met my father,” the book begins, “you would never, not for an instant, have thought he was an assassin.”
Szubanski’s new memoir, I Can’t Tell You But I Will, is an ode to her mother, “the love of [her] life”. It traces their tumultuous relationship against the backdrop of her mother’s death, which came just weeks before the result of the historic Australian same-sex marriage postal survey in 2017, for which Szubanski was the public face. [. . .]
t was not until her mother took seven long days to die – and she watched as “the stubborn engine of [her] body jolts and sputters” – that Szubanski realised what humour truly is: a form of grace. Szubanski’s writing meditates on what we owe ourselves and the dead. She exposes the fantasy that our lives are stable, predictable and containable. Illness and death shatter this illusion, revealing that we depend on one another to survive and that, in the end, the beauty and brutality of living – “the real stuff of life” – makes misfits of us all.' back

Laplace's demon - Wikipedia, Laplace's demon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' In the history of science, Laplace's demon was a notable published articulation of causal determinism on a scientific basis by Pierre-Simon Laplace in 1814. According to determinism, if someone (the demon) knows the precise location and momentum of every particle in the universe, their past and future values for any given time are entailed; they can be calculated from the laws of classical mechanics.
"We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past could be present before its eyes".' back

Manisha Caleb et al. (2026_10_08), A fast radio burst at redshift 2, three billion years after the Big Bang, ' Abstract Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are millisecond-duration radio transients from extragalactic sources. Their frequency and polarization properties are affected by plasma and magnetic fields along the line of sight to Earth. We report radio observations of FRB 20240304B and near-infrared follow-up to identify its host galaxy. The host is a low-mass, clumpy, star-forming galaxy at redshift 2.148 ± 0.0013, corresponding to 3 billion years after the Big Bang. This FRB occurred during the peak of cosmic star formation and probes ionized gas over approximately 80% of cosmic history. The highly scattered burst emission implies that there is a population of FRBs that are undetected by current surveys.
FRBs are bright, coherent, millisecond-duration radio pulses of unidentified origin(s). They exhibit a frequency-dependent delay in arrival times, which is consistent with having propagated through cold ionized plasma. Quantifying this time delay, known as the dispersion measure (DM), provides a direct estimate of the electron column density integrated along the line of sight to each burst. If the host galaxy of an FRB can be identified, the spectroscopic redshift can be measured to determine the distance. The relationship between DM and distance is known as the Macquart relation, which could potentially constrain cosmology and galaxy evolution, by probing feedback processes in galaxies (4), and the re-ionization of the Universe after the Big Bang.' back

Marium Ali (2026_03_03), How many countries has the US bombed since 2001, and how much has it cost?, ' The cost of decades of war
In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks, President George W Bush launched what he called a “war on terror”, a global military campaign that reshaped US foreign policy and triggered wars, invasions and air strikes across numerous countries.
According to an analysis by Brown University’s Watson Institute of International & Public Affairs, US-led wars since 2001 have directly caused the deaths of about 940,000 people across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and other conflict zones.
This does not include indirect deaths, namely those caused by loss of access to food, healthcare or war-related diseases.
The US has spent an estimated $5.8 trillion funding its more than two decades of conflict.
This includes $2.1 trillion spent by the Department of Defense (DOD), $1.1 trillion by Homeland Security, $884bn to increase the DOD base budget, $465bn on veterans’ medical care and an additional $1 trillion in interest payments on loans taken out to fund the wars.
In addition to the $5.8 trillion already spent, the US is expected to have to lay out at least another $2.2 trillion for veterans’ care over the next 30 years.
This would bring the total estimated cost of US wars since 2001 to $8 trillion.
back

Miryam Naddaf & Ewen Callaway (2026_10_05), Medicine Nobel awarded for brain ‘switch’ that controls neurons with light, 'After being on many scientists’ shortlists for years, optogenetics — a technology that allows researchers to control the brain’s neurons with pulses of light — has been recognized by the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The technique has transformed how neuroscientists study the brain, offering them a way to test cause and effect.
‘What took them so long?’ This year’s medicine Nobel winner is overdue The winners are Karl Deisseroth at Stanford University in California, Peter Hegemann at the Humboldt University of Berlin and Georg Nagel at the University of Würzburg in Germany. They share the prize of 12 million Swedish kronor (US$1.2 million) equally. Deisseroth said that, as a night owl, he had been working late before he received the call from the Nobel committee. “It was a complete surprise,” he told a press conference held by Stanford University today. “I was lying down, just starting to drift off to sleep, and my phone rang at my bedside,” he said. “There were about 30 seconds where I had trouble forming words … but [it’s] very exciting and overwhelming, and just delightful.” A switch neuroscientists dreamt of Neuroscientists’ aim is to unpick the brain’s many roles: how it governs feelings, behaviours and bodily functions. To understand how the brain works and how its cells mediate different behaviours, scientists require an approach that can perturb the system with high precision. “Optogenetics provides opportunities for mapping the brain in a way that we could once only dream of,” said Per Svenningsson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine, in the press release announcing the prize. back

Nicene Creed - Wikipedia, Nicene Creed - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The Nicene Creed (Greek: Σύμβολον τῆς Νίκαιας, Latin: Symbolum Nicaenum) is the profession of faith or creed that is most widely used in Christian liturgy. It forms the mainstream definition of Christianity for most Christians. It is called Nicene because, in its original form, it was adopted in the city of Nicaea (present day Iznik in Turkey) by the first ecumenical council, which met there in the year 325. The Nicene Creed has been normative for the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Church of the East, the Oriental Orthodox churches, the Anglican Communion, and the great majority of Protestant denominations.' back

Richard Van Noorden (2026_10_02), Prozac use for childhood depression skewed by single flawed medical trial, ' A single clinical trial of 40 children in Iran, published in 2006, might have wrongly swayed medical evidence in favour of using Prozac (fluoxetine) to treat depression in children and adolescents, a group of researchers say. They’re now calling that trial’s findings into question and suggest that, in their opinion, Prozac’s recommendation in paediatric clinical guidelines isn’t sufficiently supported by the evidence — although they stop short of calling for clinicians to stop prescribing Prozac for depression in children.[. . .]
Scientists have repeatedly warned that flawed studies are affecting the results of systematic reviews in medicine and other fields, but it’s rare to find such a clear example, Naudet says. [. . .]
Prozac is one of the most frequently prescribed antidepressants in children. Many national prescribing guidelines recommend the drug on the basis of a 2016 meta-analysis published in The Lancet, which found that Prozac is better than placebo for treating depression in children and adolescents. A 2020 meta-analysis in The Lancet Psychiatry supported those findings. But in 2021, a meta-analysis published in Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews4 found that Prozac had only a ‘small and unimportant’ advantage over placebo, and that it was probably no better than other antidepressants. In the latest study, Naudet and his colleagues found that the reason that the meta-analyses disagreed comes down to whether they included or excluded just one clinical trial, conducted in Iran and published in 2006. This trial found that Prozac had an enormous advantage over another antidepressant, nortriptyline. The effect size of this result was so big as to be unheard of in biomedical science, says Martin Plöderl, a clinical psychotherapist at Paracelsus Medical Private University in Salzburg, Austria, and a co-author of the latest study. “It’s the kind of effect size you only get if you ask people whether they prefer chocolate or faeces,” he says.' back

Rodney E. Rohde (2022_09_28), Louis Pasteur’s scientific discoveries in the 19th century revolutionized medicine and continue to save the lives of millions today, ' Louis Pasteur, who lived from 1822 to 1895, is arguably the world’s best-known microbiologist. He is widely credited for the germ theory of disease and for inventing the process of pasteurization – which is named after him – to preserve foods. Remarkably, he also developed the rabies and anthrax vaccines and made major contributions to combating cholera.
But because he died in 1895, six years before the first Nobel Prize was awarded, that prize isn’t on his resume. Had he lived in the era of Nobel Prizes, he would undoubtedly have been deserving of one for his work. Nobel Prizes, which are awarded in various fields, including physiology and medicine, are not given posthumously.
During the current time of ongoing threats from emerging or reemerging infectious diseases, from COVID-19 and polio to monkeypox and rabies, it is awe-inspiring to look back on Pasteur’s legacy. His efforts fundamentally changed how people view infectious diseases and how to fight them via vaccines.[. . .] back

Stephen Witt (2026_10_07), Why He Thinks A.I. Is Going Great., ' At the recent White House tech summit, Jensen Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, sat in the chair next to President Trump — his literal right-hand man. Later that day, Mr. Huang used the term “super intelligence,” just as the president prefers. In the aftermath of this summer’s rogue A.I. attacks, Mr. Huang has emerged as a leading skeptic of the danger this technology poses. As his biographer, I understand why he dismisses the risk. I also worry that he’s not seeing the whole picture. [. . .]
Mr. Huang is himself a systems guy and that informs his view of A.I. I’ve interviewed at least a hundred GPU engineers by this point, and I have yet to meet one who was seriously concerned about runaway A.I. On the other hand, most of the software engineers I talk to are extremely concerned. Bill Gates recently warned that A.I. could kill one billion humans.
The situation is baffling: here are two groups of rational, high-IQ technical experts looking at the same data and reaching totally opposite conclusions. It reminds of the viral image “The Dress,” where some people saw blue and black, and some people saw white and gold. [. . .]
But that’s not how the hardware guys see it. They draw a clear distinction between actual neurons — which are biological cells that can be unpredictable — and synthetic neurons, which are simple mathematical models whose behavior can be forecast with perfect accuracy. When you work from the microchip up, maintaining control of A.I. is an engineering problem, and governed by the same input/output constraints as any other. To the A.I. doomer skeptics, safe A.I. is a math equation — or, in Mr. Huang’s words, just “software.” [. . ]
So perhaps it is unsurprising that Mr. Huang believes he can make the artificial neuron safe. From his point of view, if you can see every calculation the machine does, right in front of you, then the machine should remain entirely within your control. If the machine is misbehaving — well, that’s your fault. All you need is better engineering. He knows it can be done. [. . .]
This situation worries me. Mr. Huang is the most capable individual I have ever met — but, I fear, A.I. is more capable still. I suspect that the capabilities exist, today, for A.I. to enhance dangerous pathogens and to shut down electrical grids. At the same time, the science of interpreting and controlling A.I. is years behind the science of making it smarter. At a granular level, we can control the behavior of synthetic neurons, but technologists can’t currently explain how these neurons coordinate to produce intelligence. That gap in understanding is widening, and I don’t know if Mr. Huang can see it.' back

Teagan George (2026_10_07), Climate win: Hunter community group wins four- year legal fight in landmark High Court ruling, ' A Hunter Valley community group has won a four-year legal fight over a major coal mine expansion, with the High Court ruling that NSW planning authorities must consider how burning exported coal overseas contributes to climate damage in Australia.
Climate advocates celebrated Wednesday’s landmark judgement, saying it would reshape how fossil fuel projects are approved across the country.
“Today the High Court has said what we have always known: we cannot dig up coal, ship it overseas, watch it drive climate change, and then pretend the consequences have nothing to do with us and won’t be felt by us,” said Wendy Wales, president of the Denman Aberdeen Muswellbrook Scone Healthy Environment Group (DAMS HEG). “The droughts, the bushfires, the floods — are directly connected to greenhouse gases, and massive fossil fuel projects like Mt Pleasant Optimisation simply add fuel to the fire.” Lock the Gate Alliance NSW coordinator Nic Clyde said the ruling would affect 17 coal projects currently in the state’s planning pipeline. “The community needed a win like this,” he said. “It gives us a little bit of hope.” back

Themiya Nanayakkara & Manisha Caleb (2026_10_09), Astronomers pinpoint the origin of a 10 billion‑year‑old millisecond signal from space , ' More than 10 billion years ago, something in a distant galaxy gave off an incredibly bright burst of radio waves which lasted just a few milliseconds. In new research published today in Science, our team tracked it back to its origin in a small galaxy filled with many young stars, when the universe was only one-fifth of its current age. Fast radio bursts like this one are a mystery scientists have been trying to unravel for almost 20 years since they were first discovered. Our discovery is the most distant such burst whose host galaxy has yet been identified. [. . .]
The most exciting thing about this discovery, however, may not be the distance itself.
As the radio signal made its way to Earth, it picked up the imprint of everything it passed through, bearing a record of the magnetic fields, changes in the space environment, and turbulence that it encountered. This makes it a gold mine of information about the cosmos that is otherwise difficult to access.
This includes how electrons are distributed through the cosmic web, as well as information on magnetic fields that pervade the universe. As the signal encounters magnetic fields along the way they subtly twist the orientation of its radio waves. By measuring this twist, we learn about the magnetic field complexities across many billions of light years.
FRB 20240304B does more than tell us about one distant galaxy. It gives us a new data point for studying how electrically charged matter has been distributed through the universe over cosmic time, and also how magnetised the cosmos is.' back

UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry (2025_09_16), Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip, UN Commission finds, ' GENEVA – Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel said in a new report today. The Commission urges Israel and all States to fulfil their legal obligations under international law to end the genocide and punish those responsible for it. The Commission has been investigating the events on and since 7 October 2023 for the last two years, and concluded that Israeli authorities and Israeli security forces committed four of the five genocidal acts defined by the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, namely killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of the Palestinians in whole or in part, and imposing measures intended to prevent births. Explicit statements by Israeli civilian and military authorities and the pattern of conduct of the Israeli security forces indicate that the genocidal acts were committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as a group. “The Commission finds that Israel is responsible for the commission of genocide in Gaza,” said Navi Pillay, Chair of the Commission. “It is clear that there is an intent to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza through acts that meet the criteria set forth in the Genocide Convention.” “The responsibility for these atrocity crimes lies with Israeli authorities at the highest echelons who have orchestrated a genocidal campaign for almost two years now with the specific intent to destroy the Palestinian group in Gaza,” Pillay said. “The Commission also finds that Israel has failed to prevent and punish the commission of genocide, through failure to investigate genocidal acts and to prosecute alleged perpetrators.” back

Vebjørn L. Horsfjord (2024_05_06), Patriarch and patriot: history in Patriarch Kirill’s sermons in the first year of the full-scale war in Ukraine, ' ABSTRACT The leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and all Rus, has correctly been seen as a staunch supporter of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. However, explicit statements of support for the war are rare in his public sermons and speeches, and it is worth exploring the mechanisms of his support in some detail. The article presents an analysis of all the patriarch’s sermons and speeches between February 2022 and February 2023 and shows how the patriarch uses references to history to nurture a worldview that makes the war both legitimate and necessary. Using Duncan Bell’s notion of a mythscape, the author argues that Kirill infuses secular history with divine meaning in order to give indirect divine legitimation for the war in Ukraine. He further relates this to Stoeckl’s contention that the Russian Orthodox Church’s promotion of so-called traditional values func - tions as civil religion for today’s Russia and suggests that Kirill’s use of history nurtures this civil religion further. back

Whitney Phillips & Mark Brockway (2026), How Demonology Won the 2024 Election, ' In the days leading up to the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump accused the Democratic Party of being “demonic,” said that former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was an “evil, sick, crazy” word-that-starts-with-a-B (“Buh-,” he teased), and openly fantasized about his enemies being shot. These statements aligned with the Trump campaign’s final messaging push about enemies within and enemies at the gates. Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally, held a week before the election, embodied this spirit; speakers called Democratic nominee Kamala Harris “the devil” and “the antichrist” and described the “whole fucking” Democratic Party as “a bunch of degenerates,” among other invectives.
This article is adapted from Whitney Phillips and Mark Brockway’s book “The Shadow Gospel: How Anti-Liberal Demonology Possessed U.S. Religion, Media, and Politics.”
The fact that Trump won swiftly and decisively, and beyond that, gained votes across almost every demographic group despite all the vitriol and controversy that swirled in the lead-up to November 5, seems to point to a powerful and growing cult of personality. We make a very different argument in our book, “The Shadow Gospel.” Trump hasn’t built a cult of personality. Trump has inherited a cult of demonology, the origins of which extend back to the Cold War and center on a shape-shifting liberal devil mapped sometimes onto nefarious “elites,” sometimes onto economic leftism (which also rails against elites, but that’s just details), sometimes onto the institutional Democratic Party, and sometimes, simply, onto things demonologists don’t like. This is a devil that spans partisan lines and defies logical coherence. back

William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 'The voice of the Devil. All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors. 1. That Man has two real existing principles Viz: a Body & a Soul. 2. That Energy, call'd Evil, is alone from the Body, & that Reason, call'd Good, is alone from the Soul. 3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies. But the following Contraries to these are True 1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that call'd Body is a portion of Soul discern'd by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age 2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy. 3 Energy is Eternal Delight.' back