Unexpected Intent

Superheated gold withstands 'entropy catastrophe': New method challenges established physics

Jul 2025, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2025-07-superheated-gold-entropy-catastrophe-method.html

In an experimental debut, the team superheated solid gold far beyond the theoretical limit, unexpectedly overturning four decades of established theory. The team was thrilled to have successfully demonstrated this technique—and as they took a deeper look at the data, they discovered something even more exciting.

"We were surprised to find a much higher temperature in these superheated solids than we initially expected, which disproves a long-standing theory from the 1980s," White said. "This wasn't our original goal, but that's what science is about—discovering new things you didn't know existed."

In their recent study, the team discovered that the gold had been superheated to an astonishing 19,000 kelvins (33,740 degrees Fahrenheit) - more than 14 times its melting point and well beyond the proposed entropy catastrophe limit - all while maintaining its solid crystalline structure.

"It's important to clarify that we did not violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics," White said with a chuckle. "What we demonstrated is that these catastrophes can be avoided if materials are heated extremely quickly — in our case, within trillionths of a second."

The researchers believe that the rapid heating prevented the gold from expanding, enabling it to retain its solid state. The findings suggest that there may not be an upper limit for superheated materials, if heated quickly enough.

via US Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory: Thomas G. White et al, Superheating gold beyond the predicted entropy catastrophe threshold, Nature (2025). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09253-y

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09253-y

Image credit: Crushed Crushed Tomatoes, found in the wild at local Shop Rite

Very different mammals follow the same rules of behavior: Research hints at an underlying architecture

May 202,5 phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2025-05-mammals-behavior-hints-underlying-architecture.html

Across behaviors, individuals, and species, one common principle emerged: The longer an animal stays in one behavioral state, the less likely it is to change it in the next moment. "This was unexpected"

via Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior: Pranav Minasandra et al, Behavioral sequences across multiple animal species in the wild share common structural features, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2503962122

https://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2503962122

How a one‑eyed creature gave rise to our modern eyes

Feb 2026, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2026-02-oneeyed-creature-gave-modern-eyes.html

"The results are a surprise. They turn our understanding of the evolution of the eye and the brain upside down"

All vertebrates evolved from a distant ancestor that had a single eye located at the top of its head, and the remnants of this so-called median eye have today become the pineal gland in our brains.

600 million years ago, a worm that had two eyes, for some reason, lost them, but kept a group of light-sensitive cells in the middle of its head that developed into a small, primitive median eye that could keep track of night and day, and sense what was up and down.

A million years later, from parts of the small median eye, new image-forming eyes in pairs developed. 

"Now we finally understand why the eyes of vertebrates differ so radically from the eyes of all other animal groups, such as insects and squid. The film of our eyes—the retina—developed from the brain, whereas the eyes of insects and squid originate in the skin on the sides of the head."

A fascinating fact is that remnants of the ancient parietal median eye from our distant ancestor actually remain in our heads today, transformed into the pineal gland. The pineal gland is a light-sensitive organ in the vertebrate brain. It produces the hormone melatonin, which helps regulate the body's circadian rhythm.

"It's mind-boggling that our pineal gland's ability to regulate our sleep according to light stems from the cyclopean median eye of a distant ancestor 600 million years ago,"

via Lund University: George Kafetzis et al, Evolution of the vertebrate retina by repurposing of a composite ancestral median eye, Current Biology (2026). DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2025.12.028

https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2025.12.028

Post Script: Pineal Organoids

Lab-grown pineal gland organoids produce melatonin, offering a new sleep model

Apr 2026, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-04-lab-grown-pineal-gland-organoids.html

via Yale University: Ferdi Ridvan Kiral et al, Generation of human pineal gland organoids with melatonin production for disease modeling, Cell Stem Cell (2026). DOI: 10.1016/j.stem.2025.12.004

https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.stem.2025.12.004

Enquiring Minds

Science does weird things sometimes, especially when you're not really sure what it does. Like, does science figure things out, or does it make things more confusing? Does it prove things right, or does it prove things wrong? Does it discover, or does it forget? Man I'm already confused. 

Analysis claims statistical proof of the COVID-19 seafood market hypothesis is false

Jan 2024, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-01-analysis-statistical-proof-covid-seafood.html

Hard to believe, years later: "Research on this question is still in its infancy," explains Stoyan.

Real science, good science, takes time. And it takes time because it needs people to correct each other, over and over, until we all agree that we're all right. 

As for this one, I am not statistician, but even I can see why this was a dumb study:

Stoyan and Chiu used the same geostatistical data as Worobey and colleagues. These are the residential addresses of the first 155 coronavirus cases. These addresses were entered as points on a map. In the Science article, this dot pattern is compared with dot patterns generated by simulation, finding significant differences. However, since these artificial dot patterns are incorrectly chosen, the test used must always reject the hypothesis that a location other than the market is the epicenter.

In other words, Worobey and colleagues have excluded locations other than the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market from the outset. However, other locations in the vicinity of the market could also be possible candidates: A large railway station and a huge shopping complex with hotels and restaurants. 

via the Freiberg University of Mining and Technology: Dietrich Stoyan et al, Statistics did not prove that the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market was the early epicentre of the COVID-19 pandemic, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A: Statistics in Society (2024). DOI: 10.1093/jrsssa/qnad139

https://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jrsssa/qnad139

Why the Freiberg University of Mining and Technology?

The Technische Universität Bergakademie Freiberg (abbreviation: TU Bergakademie Freiberg, TUBAF) is a public university of technology with 3,471 students in the city of Freiberg, Saxony, Germany. Its focuses are exploration, mining & extraction, processing, and recycling of natural resources & scrap, as well as developing new materials and researching renewable energies. It is highly specialized and proficient in these fields. Today, it's the oldest university of mining and metallurgy in the world.

(No idea why)

Image credit: AI Art - 1930s Poster of a Surgeon Performing a Brain Transplant - 2024

https://lexica.art/prompt/30d03bde-9812-484a-bbc5-8744a433a7d9

Filed under wtf:

Study examines aerodynamic performance of nylon shuttlecocks

Jan 2024, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2024-01-aerodynamic-nylon-shuttlecocks.html

Shuttlecocks, also known as birdies or birds, are traditionally made from duck feathers, but nylon shuttlecocks have become more widely used because of their superior durability. Their flight behavior, however, is far different from that of traditional feather birdies.

In Physics of Fluids, a trio of scientists in India explored the aerodynamic performance of nylon shuttlecocks at various flight speeds. Through computational analyses based on two-way fluid-structure interactions, the team coupled equations governing air flow with equations determining skirt deformation of a shuttlecock in flight.

The study's computational results confirm experimental measurements, explaining the phenomenology of why a duck feather shuttlecock does not deform as much as a nylon shuttlecock - and why the flight of each at high speed is quite different.

via Department of Aerospace Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur: Computational analysis of the fluid-structure interactions of a synthetic badminton shuttlecock, Physics of Fluids (2024). DOI: 10.1063/5.0182411

https://dx.doi.org/10.1063/5.0182411

Interstellar signal linked to aliens was actually just a truck

Mar 2024, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2024-03-interstellar-linked-aliens-truck.html

Facts vs Fandom:

After a meteor entered Earth's atmosphere over the Western Pacific in January 2014, the event was linked to ground vibrations recorded at a seismic station in Papua New Guinea's Manus Island. In 2023, materials at the bottom of the ocean near where the meteor fragments were thought to have fallen were identified as of "extraterrestrial technological" (alien) origin.

Sound waves thought to be from a 2014 meteor fireball north of Papua New Guinea were almost certainly vibrations from a truck rumbling along a nearby road.

Says planetary seismologist. 

Johns Hopkins University: Benjamin Fernando et al, Seismic and acoustic signals from the 2014 'Interstellar Meteor', arXiv (2024). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2403.03966 ,

doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2403.03966

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2403.03966SS

Materials follow the 'Rule of Four,' but scientists don't know why yet

Apr 2024, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2024-04-materials-scientists-dont.html

"Rare example of a scientific paper describing a negative result"; it happens.

The two collections of materials science databases include over 80,000 electronic structures of experimental as well as predicted materials; scientists noticed that around 60 percent of structures in both databases have primitive unit cells made out of a multiple of 4 atoms. The scientists named this recurrence the "Rule of Four" and started looking for an explanation.

"The first question we asked was whether the software used to 'primitivize' the unit cell had done it correctly, and the answer was yes."

"We could expect to find that all the materials following this Rule of Four included silicon (which has a coordination number of 4)," says Gazzarini. "But again, they did not."

"The materials that are most abundant in nature should be the most energetically favored, which means the most stable ones, those with negative formation energy. But what we saw with classic computational methods was that there was no correlation between the Rule of Four and negative formation energies."

A machine-learning expert at the University of Wisconsin developed an algorithm to group structures according to their atomic properties and look at formation energies within classes of materials sharing some chemical similarities. But again, this method did not provide a way to distinguish the Rule-of-Four compliant materials from the non-compliant ones.

Similarly, the abundance of multiple of fours does not even correlate with highly symmetric structures but rather with low symmetries and loosely packed arrangements.

In the end, the resulting article in npj Computational Materials is the rare example of a scientific paper describing a negative result: the researchers could only describe the phenomenon and rule out several possible causes, without finding one.

via EPFL Swiss Federal Institute for Technology in Lausanne and National Centre of Competence in Research: Elena Gazzarrini et al, The rule of four: anomalous distributions in the stoichiometries of inorganic compounds, npj Computational Materials (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41524-024-01248-z

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41524-024-01248-z

New research confirms plastic production is directly linked to plastic pollution

Apr 2024, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2024-04-plastic-production-linked-pollution.html

Every 1% increase in plastic production is associated with a 1% increase in plastic pollution in the environment.

Sometimes you wonder why we even need science. But then you remember that global megacorporations spend lots of money and lots of effort to hide, confuse and redirect attention and scientific investigation away from this stuff:

56 global companies are responsible for more than half of all branded plastic pollution.

The Coca-Cola Company was responsible for 11% of branded waste, followed by PepsiCo (5%), Nestlé (3%), Danone (3%), and Altria/Philip Morris International (2%). The top companies identified produce food, beverage, or tobacco products.

The five-year analysis used #BreakFreeFromPlastic brand audit data from 1,576 audit events across 84 countries. Brand audits are citizen science initiatives in which volunteers conduct waste clean-ups and document the brands found on the pollution collected. Over five years, more than 200,000 volunteers submitted data through Break Free From Plastic or 5 Gyres' TrashBlitz app. 

via Institute of Environmental & Marine Sciences and College of Engineering & Design at Silliman University, and CSIRO: Win Cowger et al, Global Producer Responsibility for Plastic Pollution, Science Advances (2024). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adj8275.

https://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adj8275

This Side of Science

Science, it's full of surprises. But I am most excited when the scientists themselves are the ones surprised. The two most exciting words I can read in the news are "scientific accident", and you'll see them below. 

First up, a long-time mystery of the universe, swept under the rug by Einstein himself, some might even call it Einstein Fudge. You know it as the cosmological constant, and it says that the universe is constantly expanding. We don't understand why the cosmological constant is there or what it's really doing, but we can't make sense of the universe without it. Until now. 

Image credit: Light Bulb Fail, Milos Jokic, Getty Images, 2019

New study proposes expansion of the universe directly impacts black hole growth

Nov 2021, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-11-expansion-universe-impacts-black-hole.html

Black holes grow along with the expansion of the universe. Black holes gain mass from the expansion of the universe itself. Masses of black holes could grow in lockstep with the universe, a phenomenon that Croker and his team call cosmological coupling.

The most well-known example of cosmologically-coupled material is light itself, which loses energy as the universe grows. "We thought to consider the opposite effect," said research co-author and UH Mānoa Physics and Astronomy Professor Duncan Farrah.

"It was a such a simple idea, I was surprised it worked so well."

via University of Hawaii at Manoa, University of Chicago, and University of Michigan at Ann Arbor: Kevin S. Croker et al, Cosmologically Coupled Compact Objects: A Single-parameter Model for LIGO–Virgo Mass and Redshift Distributions, The Astrophysical Journal Letters (2021). DOI: 10.3847/2041-8213/ac2fad

http://dx.doi.org/10.3847/2041-8213/ac2fad

Granddaughters and great-granddaughters of men who start to smoke before puberty, have more body fat than expected

Jan 2022, phys.org

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-01-granddaughters-great-granddaughters-men-puberty-body.html

I'm just saying, how the do you even figure this out. Who is sitting there right now putting this hypothesis together in their head.

via University of Bristol: Human transgenerational observations of regular smoking before puberty on fat mass in grandchildren and great-grandchildren, Scientific Reports (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-021-04504-0

http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-04504-0

What we knew about water was right after all

Feb 2022, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2022-02-knew.html

Like the discovery of lead in the air - when something is everywhere, it's hard to notice it at all.  In this case, it seems the fact that this experiment was never done in a desert environment is all that was keeping us from the answer. 

Frankenpaste:

Probing chemical transformations at the air-water interface is challenging due to the lack of surface-specific techniques or computational models, but now they found water spontaneously transforms into 30–110 micromolar hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) as microdroplets. The textbook understanding of water is thus challenged by how the mild temperature and pressure conditions, together with the absence of catalysts, co-solvents and significant applied energy, could break covalent O–H bonds; it was previously thought to be from ultrahigh electric fields. 

It was ambient ozone -- Although ozone minimally dissolves in water, the enhanced surface area of microdroplets allows more ozone to be dissolved and quickly react to form H2O2.

"There had to be something related to the geography of the place, an environmental difference between our location in Saudi Arabia and California," Gallo Jr says.

via King Abdullah University of Science and Technology: Nayara H. Musskopf et al, The Air–Water Interface of Water Microdroplets Formed by Ultrasonication or Condensation Does Not Produce H2O2, The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters (2021). DOI: 10.1021/acs.jpclett.1c02953

http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acs.jpclett.1c02953

Life may actually flash before your eyes on death

Feb 2022, BBC News

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60495730

First-ever recording of a dying brain discovered by accident. 

"This was actually totally by chance, we did not plan to do this experiment or record these signals."

-BBC

This is also one of the reasons why it is important to care for every human equally, regardless of what happened to them. You're born without an immune system? We're keeping you alive. Paraplegic? We're giving you wifi for your body. 

You have epilepsy? We're going to slap some electrodes to your head and monitor your brainwaves for a really, really long time, and figure out how to help you. Unless you have a heart attack in the headset, in which case we'll watch what happens, and use your accident to further the advancement of science. 

via Department of Neurosurgery, Henan Provincial People’s Hospital, Division of Neurosurgery, Vancouver General Hospital: Vicente Raul et al. Enhanced Interplay of Neuronal Coherence and Coupling in the Dying Human Brain. Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience 14 2022. DOI: 10.3389/fnagi.2022.813531.

https://doi.org/10.3389/fnagi.2022.813531

Researchers report game-changing technology to remove 99% of carbon dioxide from air

Feb 2022, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2022-02-game-changing-technology-carbon-dioxide-air.html

Just some very clever thinking. 

Hydroxide exchange membrane (HEM) fuel cells, an economical and environmentally friendly alternative to traditional acid-based fuel cells used today, have a shortcoming that has kept them off the road—they are extremely sensitive to carbon dioxide in the air. Essentially, the carbon dioxide makes it hard for a HEM fuel cell to breathe. This defect quickly reduces the fuel cell's performance and efficiency by up to 20%, rendering the fuel cell no better than a gasoline engine.

"Once we dug into the mechanism, we realized the fuel cells were capturing just about every bit of carbon dioxide that came into them, and they were really good at separating it to the other side," said Brian Setzler, assistant professor for research in chemical and biomolecular engineering and paper co-author.

While this isn't good for the fuel cell, the team knew if they could leverage this built-in "self-purging" process in a separate device upstream from the fuel cell stack, they could turn it into a carbon dioxide separator.

They found a way to embed the power source for the electrochemical technology inside the separation membrane. The approach involved internally short-circuiting the device.

via University of Delaware: Lin Shi et al, A shorted membrane electrochemical cell powered by hydrogen to remove CO2 from the air feed of hydroxide exchange membrane fuel cells, Nature Energy (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41560-021-00969-5

http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41560-021-00969-5

Unrelated Post Script:

Parasite that replaces a fish's tongue caught at Texas state park

Oct 2021, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2021-10-parasite-fish-tongue-caught-texas.html

The tongue-eating louse makes its way into the fish's mouth through its gills, where it consumes the mucus that forms on the inside of the fish's mouth, and completely replaces the organ in another creature, although it doesn't harm its host.

Also, it has eyes; the parasitic zombie tongue has its own eyes.

Fake It til You Make It

Bordo - Chinese Graffiti

It sounds like what they're saying here is that people don't want science, they want bad science. I should rephrase - money doesn't want good science, but people do. Social science in particular, is in a bit of a pickle these days (see the replication crisis).

This also sounds a lot like the word of the year for 2016, post-truth, related to 'truthiness' and referencing a world where emotional reaction has more traction that cold hard facts. This is something we've always known, albeit at times in our cultural unconscious. We make things that fight this, I'm sure people like Bejamin Franklin, newspaper editor, had something to say about it. But our defenses have been lacking, and could use a rethink.

Here from The Guardian:

Smaldino cites an experiment by the American psychologist Daryl Bem, who purported to show that undergraduates could predict the future and published the result in a prestigious journal.

"What he found was the equivalent of flipping a bunch of pennies, nickels, and quarters, asking students to guess heads or tails each time, and then reporting that psychic abilities exist for pennies, but not nickels and quarters, because the students were right 53% of the time for the pennies, rather than the expected 50%. It’s insane,” said Smaldino. “Bem used exactly the same standards of evidence that all social psychologists were using to evaluate their findings. And if those standards allowed this ridiculous a hypothesis to make the cut, imagine what else was getting through.”

Cut-throat academia leads to 'natural selection of bad science', claims study
The Guardian, Sep 2016
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/sep/21/cut-throat-academia-leads-to-natural-selection-of-bad-science-claims-study