Gavin Newsom, the governor of California who also has aspirations to the presidency, has destroyed any chance he has of achieving that higher office, by creating a podcast.

The first guest on that podcast? Charlie Kirk. The unqualified white nationalist backed by far-right millionaires.

Aww hell no. I’m never going to support a candidate who gives air to evil lunatics like that.

Even worse…what did they talk about? They found common ground in their shared hatred of transgender athletes. It’s insane. Transgender kids participating in sports is a good thing that should not be of concern, and only bigots are furious at trans boys and girls. Especially since…

Newsweek also spoke to Gillian Branstetter, a spokesperson for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), who told Newsweek that Save Women’s Sports, a leading voice in the bid to ban transgender athletes from competing in girls’ sports, identified only five transgender athletes competing on girls’ teams in school sports for grades K through 12.

Yes, that’s right. Not 5000, not 500, not even 50 – just five trans student-athletes. All of this legislation, work, lobbying and anger – is aimed at preventing a tiny handful of young people from playing school sports.

It shouldn’t matter whether there are 5 or 5 million — denying rights to any group of people is wrong. Newsom is just pandering to the perception that Americans all hate trans people.

Colossal Biosciences is a tech company. You know what that means: hype, exaggeration, and lies, all to accompany developments that nobody needs or wants. In order to keep the stock prices up, they have to constantly pretend to have breakthroughs that get promoted on various media.

A plan to revive the mammoth is on track, scientists have said after creating a new species: the woolly mouse.

Scientists at the US biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences plan to “de-extinct” the prehistoric pachyderms by genetically modifying Asian elephants to give them woolly mammoth traits. They hope the first calf will be born by the end of 2028.

Ben Lamm, co-founder and chief executive of Colossal, said the team had been studying ancient mammoth genomes and comparing them with those of Asian elephants to understand how they differ and had already begun genome-editing cells of the latter.

Now the team say they have fresh support for their approach after creating healthy, genetically modified mice that have traits geared towards cold tolerance, including woolly hair. “It does not accelerate anything but it’s a massive validating point,” Lamm said.

There are a few problems with those claims.

• We already have woolly mice. We have all kinds of interesting variants of lab mice with diverse mutations, and one of them is the woolly mouse:
  

  Showing off a mutation to a single gene in a distantly related species does not take us one step closer to making a woolly mammoth, but it might impress those gullible investors and venture capitalists who we already know are flaming idiots.

• The woolly mouse, either the existing mutant or whatever new mutation they’ve inserted into this breed, does not represent a “new species”. It can still be bred with lab mice. It’s also exclusively a small lab population.

• They claim that they are going to produce the first Asian elephant calf “with woolly mammoth traits…by the end of 2028.” The first part of that prediction is absurdly vague — if they make an elephant hairier, they’re going to trumpet it as a triumph. It will not be, by any stretch of the imagination, a woolly mammoth, any more than that woolly mouse is a throwback to the Pleistocene. But also, the “end of 2028” is about three years away. The Asian elephant gestation time is 18-22 months, almost two years. They’d have to have an extensively gene-modified elephant fetus in a petri dish in about a year, or they’re going to miss their imaginary deadline, and they’ve left themselves no room for error.

So they make stuff up for their press releases. The bigger problem is that the whole company is a lie.

EXTINCTION IS A COLOSSAL PROBLEM FACING THE WORLD.
And Colossal is the company that’s going to fix it.

Combining the science of genetics with the business of discovery, we endeavor to jumpstart nature’s ancestral heartbeat. To see the Woolly Mammoth thunder upon tundra once again. To advance the economies of biology and healing through genetics. To make humanity more human. And to reawaken the lost wilds of Earth. So we, and our planet, can breathe easier.

They’re not going to fix shit. Bringing back one individual with some of the traits that made a whole population successful 500,000 years ago does not resurrect the species, especially since their ancient environment is gone. The entire network of species that coexisted with it no longer exists. At best, they might generate a sad hybrid animal that isn’t adapted to any place on the planet that will be shown off to wealthy VCs to justify more investment, but they’ll fail, the animals will be abandoned, and they’ll die off, probably more quickly than slowly.

As Adam Rutherford explains, it will be a moral debacle doomed to failure, and every competent geneticist, molecular biologist, and zoologist knows it.

And it will be utterly alone. The best possible outcome will be one single boutique animal that is profoundly confused. More likely it will die very quickly. At present the Pyrenean ibex is the only animal brought back from extinction, via cells taken from the last known member of its wild goat species. Born to a surrogate in 2003, the kid immediately died, making it the only species to have gone extinct twice. The mammoth, should Colossal succeed, would surely be the second.

The absurd and frankly ghoulish claims about the mammoth’s resurrection amount to a textbook case of science miscommunication and hubris. At a time when US scientists are under attack from their own government, the illiteracy around these elephantine fantasies is not just vexing but dangerous. The Trump administration’s threatened cuts span all scientific disciplines, but most pertinently to conservation and climate-crisis research. We are witnessing – and party to – the greatest biodiversity and species loss in human history. More than ever, science needs money, public support, and government backing. Perhaps focusing our efforts on preserving the millions of threatened creatures that actually exist should be the priority in these hostile times.

If the ghouls at Colossal actually cared about extinction, they’d be working to stop habitat destruction and save existing species. But they don’t. What they care about is the gullibility of rich tech bros and convincing them to give them more money.

Mon coeur! I swoon. I don’t understand a word that Claude Malhuret is saying, but I am dizzy with adoration now.

His speech sounded so lovely, I had to look up a translation. It’s even better in English.

My dear colleagues,

Europe is at a critical turning point in its history. The American shield is evading, Ukraine risks being abandoned, Russia strengthened.

Washington became the court of Nero, an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers and a jester under ketamine in charge of the purification of the public service.

It’s a drama for the free world, but it’s first a drama for the United States. Trump’s message is that there is no point in being his ally since he will not defend you, that he will impose more customs duties on you than on his enemies and threaten you to seize your territories while supporting the dictatorships that invade you.

The king of the deal is showing what the art of the deal is on a flat stomach. He thinks he will intimidate China by lying down in front of Putin, but Xi Jinping, faced with such a shipwreck, is undoubtedly accelerating preparations for the invasion of Taiwan.

Never in history has a president of the United States capitulated to the enemy. No one has ever supported an aggressor against an ally. No one has ever trampled on the American Constitution, made so many illegal decrees, revoked the judges who could prevent it, dismissed the military staff at once, weakened all counter-powers and took control of social networks.

It is not an illiberal drift, it is a beginning of confiscation of democracy. Let us remember that it took only a month, three weeks and two days to bring down the Weimar Republic and its Constitution.

I have confidence in the strength of American democracy and the country is already protesting. But in one month, Trump has done more harm to America than in four years of his last presidency. We were at war against a dictator, we are now fighting against a dictator supported by a traitor.

Eight days ago, at the very time that Trump passed his hand behind Macron’s back at the White House, the United States voted at the UN with Russia and North Korea against Europeans demanding the departure of Russian troops.

Two days later, in the oval office, the military service hide-and-seek gave moral and strategy lessons to the war hero Zelensky before dismissing him as a brother-in-law by ordering him to submit or resign.

That night, he took a step further into infamy by stopping the promised delivery of weapons. What to do in the face of this betrayal? The answer is simple: face it.

And first don’t make a mistake. The defeat of Ukraine would be the defeat of Europe. The Baltics, Georgia, Moldova are already on the list. Putin’s goal is the return to Yalta where half of the continent was ceded to Stalin.

The countries of the South are waiting for the outcome of the conflict to decide whether they should continue to respect Europe or whether they are now free to trample on it.

What Putin wants is the end of the order put in place by the United States and its allies 80 years ago, with the first principle of prohibiting the acquisition of territories by force.

This idea is at the very source of the UN, where today Americans vote in favor of the aggressor and against the aggressor, because the Trumpian vision coincides with that of Putin: a return to the spheres of influence, the great powers dictating the fate of small countries.

To me Greenland, Panama and Canada, to you Ukraine, the Baltic States and Eastern Europe, to him Taiwan and the China Sea.

This is called “diplomatic realism” in the evenings of the oligarchs of the Gulf of Mar-a-Lago.

So we are alone. But the speech that we cannot resist Putin is false. Contrary to the Kremlin’s propaganda, Russia is doing badly. In three years, the so-called second army in the world has only managed to grab crumbs from a country three times less populated.

Interest rates at 25%, the collapse of foreign exchange and gold reserves, and demographic collapse show that it is on the edge of the abyss. The American boost to Putin is the biggest strategic mistake ever made during a war.

The shock is violent, but it has a virtue. Europeans come out of denial. They understood in one day in Munich that the survival of Ukraine and the future of Europe are in their hands and that they have three imperatives.

Accelerate military aid to Ukraine to compensate for the American release, to make it hold, and of course to impose its presence and that of Europe in any negotiation.

It will be expensive. It will be necessary to end the taboo of the use of frozen Russian assets. It will be necessary to bypass Moscow’s accomplices even within Europe by a coalition of only voluntary countries, with of course the United Kingdom.

Secondly, require that any agreement be accompanied by the return of kidnapped children, prisoners and absolute security guarantees. After Budapest, Georgia and Minsk, we know what the agreements with Putin are worth. These guarantees require sufficient military force to prevent a new invasion.

Finally, and this is the most urgent, because it is what will take the most time, we would have to build the neglected European defense, for the benefit of the American umbrella since 1945 and sunk since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

It is a Herculean task, but it is on its success or failure that the leaders of today’s democratic Europe will be judged in the history books.

Friedrich Merz has just declared that Europe needs its own military alliance. It is to recognize that France was right for decades in pleading for strategic autonomy.

It remains to build it. It will be necessary to invest massively, strengthen the European Defense Fund outside the Maastricht debt criteria, harmonize weapons and ammunition systems, accelerate Ukraine’s entry into the Union, which is today the first European army, rethink the place and conditions of nuclear deterrence from French and British capacities, relaunch anti-missile and satellite shield programs.

The plan announced yesterday by Ursula von der Leyen is a very good starting point. And it will take much more.

Europe will only become a military power again by becoming an industrial power again. In a word, the Draghi report will have to be applied. For good.

But the real rearmament of Europe is its moral rearmament.

We must convince public opinion in the face of weariness and fear of war, and especially in the face of Putin’s companions, the extreme right and the extreme left.

They pleaded again yesterday in the National Assembly, Mr. Prime Minister, before you, against European unity, against European defense.

They say they want peace. What neither they nor Trump say is that their peace is the capitulation, the peace of defeat, the replacement of de Gaulle Zelensky by a Ukrainian Pétain in Putin’s boot.

The peace of the collaborators who have refused for three years any help to the Ukrainians.

Is this the end of the Atlantic Alliance? The risk is great. But in recent days, Zelensky’s public humiliation and all the crazy decisions taken over the past month have ended up making Americans react.

Polls are falling. Republican elected officials are greeted by hostile crowds in their constituencies. Even Fox News becomes critical.

The Trumpists are no longer in majesty. They control the executive, Parliament, the Supreme Court and social networks.

But in American history, the supporters of freedom have always won. They begin to raise their heads.

The fate of Ukraine is played out in the trenches, but it also depends on those in the United States who want to defend democracy, and here on our ability to unite Europeans, to find the means of their common defense, and to make Europe the power it once was in history and that it hesitates to become again.

Our parents defeated fascism and communism at the cost of all sacrifices.

The task of our generation is to defeat the totalitarianisms of the 21st century.

Long live free Ukraine, long live democratic Europe.

Can you repeat that in Italian now? In Spanish? German? It would sound terrific in any language, except maybe Russian.

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! As my patrons know, each month I do a special livestream where we chat and I answer any questions they have. Last month, one of the Michaels asked about the game Werewolf, linking to a …

I didn’t watch Trump’s cavalcade of lies last night, so I appreciate this compressed version that squeezes it down to a minute. Greenland, huh? No unelected bureaucrats while praising Elon Musk? Throwing out a protester while claiming to defend free speech? Woke is dead?

OK, that was bad, but possibly worse was the Democratic response in which Elissa Slotkin looked back fondly on Ronald Reagan’s presidency and was a cheerleader for American exceptionalism. Go away, Republican wanna-bes.

I call this an attempt to crush dissent. I guess I’m going to have to protest.

Like on Friday, when I’m protesting for science in St Paul.

The defining image of Javier Milei’s rapid rise to power in Argentina was his favourite campaign stunt: waving a chainsaw above his head and promising to crush the political elite. The garden tool served as a symbol of his libertarian, small-state ideology. The state is not the solution, he told delegates of the World Economic Forum; it is the problem.

When Milei took office in December 2023, Argentina was in the grips of a deep economic crisis, with monthly inflation at 25 per cent. By January, a little over a year later, this figure had fallen to a projected 2.5 per cent and the government budget is now in surplus. But this result has been achieved through drastic measures: tens of thousands of government workers have been trimmed from the payroll and entire departments shuttered.

Argentines are now split on whether this cost-cutting is a masterly gambit that will transform lives for the better, or an irresponsible gamble that is doomed to fail. If you believe Milei’s supporters, Argentina is showing the world how it’s done and is on the brink of prosperity. If you listen to his critics, then the poorest in society and basic rights have been thrown by the wayside.

Even as inflation has fallen, poverty has soared. And Milei has made no secret of his disdain for human rights, attacking feminism, climate change advocacy and independent journalism. The right to protest has been stripped back and welfare support has been cut. During his campaign he promised a referendum on abortion access, though he has not yet acted on that. In October, Amnesty International published an open letter to the president in which it expressed “serious concerns” about the human rights situation in the country, citing poverty and freedom of expression.

While swathes of Argentines have been buoyed by what they see as the country’s growing economic stability – buying property and opening savings accounts for the first time – others fear what could happen next.

Inflation falls, poverty rises

Milei was an unlikely candidate for the presidency. He entered politics in 2021, just two years before ascending to power. He was previously an economist, best known for wild rants on television and dressing up as libertarian “superhero” General Ancap (from anarcho-capitalist), whose mission was to “kick Keynesians in the ass”. He advocates for “freedom”, which he interprets narrowly as economic freedom and individual property rights.

On many measures Milei has delivered economic success. By slashing government spending and reining in inflation, the state ran a surplus in 2024 up until December, turning a tide after more than a decade of budget deficit. For Nicolás Saldías, a senior analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit, Milei “has beaten expectations on many fronts and in many ways it’s a successful presidency so far”.

But the impact on ordinary Argentines has been stark. The poverty rate surged to 53 per cent in the first half of 2024, up from 40 per cent in 2023, although some private estimates suggest it began to fall again by the end of the year. Funding for the welfare state has been slashed, along with jobs and salaries in the country’s substantial public sector, leading to rising unemployment. For much of the year, Argentina was in a recession, from which it only emerged in mid-December.

“The economy is growing in a very uneven manner,” said Saldías. “Sectors that sell to the domestic market are struggling, especially construction, and Milei has really cut to the bone in terms of state spending. It’s a really mixed picture.” The economy seems to be turning a corner, with the International Monetary Fund projecting growth at 5 per cent this year. However, given that GDP shrank by 3.5 per cent in 2024, following a 1.6 per cent contraction in 2023, this growth will only just about reverse those declines.

Meanwhile, the poorest Argentines have been left in a desperate situation, with the removal of subsidies and the lack of support for safety nets like food banks. Lore Dominguez, 42, works for grassroots organisation La Poderosa, which runs a soup kitchen in one of Buenos Aires’ slums. Sitting in a small room with a basic cooker and stacks of giant pots, Dominguez says Milei’s supposed economic successes haven’t been evenly distributed.

“People living in the slums haven’t received [help] from the government. It’s been a year since Milei became president and the situation in the slums has worsened,” she said. “Economic [policy] is not enough. I still have to work three jobs. The state is totally absent for us.” She added: “They say what he is doing is for Argentina. It’s not for Argentina. In this country there are no more middle-class people. There are the poor and the millionaires.”

The middle classes are feeling the effects and could soon run out of patience, confirms Marcelo Garcia, Americas director at US geopolitics consultancy Horizon Engage. Meanwhile, the sight of families searching through large public bins has become more common and some have abandoned cooking with gas in favour of wood fires due to soaring fuel costs. Milei insists that it is the “political class” paying the price of his cuts, rather than ordinary people. But the majority of Argentines, who pride themselves on living in a middle-class nation, are struggling to pay the bills, while those in extreme deprivation are facing homelessness and starvation.

'Witch-hunts' and clampdowns

Then there is the political climate. Argentines know better than most the dangers of authoritarian rule. In 1976 the military seized power in Argentina. The terror that the junta wrought over the next seven years is by some estimates the bloodiest seen across South America’s many dictatorships of the period. Human rights groups suggest that as many as 30,000 people were killed. In what came to be known as death flights, supposed dissidents were flown out over the sea in the middle of the night and pushed from planes to perish in the icy waters of the Rio de la Plata.

Perhaps as a consequence, Argentines feel a strong connection to democratic principles, like the freedom to protest and freedom of the press. And some fear these are under threat in Milei’s Argentina.

Tens of thousands have taken to the streets since Milei too power to oppose his policies, but restrictions on protest are increasing. In December, police were granted additional rights to target protestors who blocked roads, while those bringing children to protests were warned they could be sanctioned. Some protests have been violently opposed by rows of police in full riot gear. In August, pensioners protesting a decision not to increase their payouts in line with inflation were met by police with pepper spray. One attendee, Rubén Bogado, 72, said he saw elderly protestors beaten with sticks and targeted with pepper spray and tear gas. “The repression and arbitrary arrests are an attempt to intimidate, but they cannot hide the anger of those who are legitimately mobilising to protect their rights,” he said.

Journalists, too, have been a target for Milei and his allies. In February, a press union said that a dozen journalists had been hit by rubber bullets while covering a protest, while the Argentine Journalism Forum has documented at least 52 occasions of “stigmatising rhetoric” and harassment. Milei also has the backing of an army of internet trolls who have been known to harass critical journalists and opposition politicians. Luciana Peker, a well-known feminist writer, has left the country following harassment from supporters of Milei. She told the Guardian that women are facing a “witch-hunt” from the “ultra-right”.

As a result, Argentina fell from 40th to 66th place in the 2024 Press Freedom Index compiled by the charity Reporters Without Borders. The organisation said: “The election of Javier Milei, a president openly hostile to the media, poses a disturbing new threat to the right to information in the country.”

'Never again'

According to Facundo Iglesia, a reporter for Crisis, an Argentine political magazine, Milei claims to be democratising access to information by posting on social media, thus bypassing “lying journalists”. It’s a similar tactic to President Trump and Elon Musk in the US. But Milei’s rhetoric is marked out by its viciousness, Iglesia said. “Even if Milei isn’t directly involved, these constant attacks on journalists definitely embolden people.” While Iglesia said he is not aware of colleagues self-censoring the stories they write, he said he would “think twice” before posting his stories on social media.

Ernesto Calvo, a professor of politics at the University of Maryland, who has studied online trolling in Argentina and Brazil, said the consequence is that people remove themselves from online spaces, which then become more polarised. “They lock their accounts or close them altogether. They are moving people from the public sphere to the private sphere,” he explained. “This didn’t start with Milei ... Every party has trolls. What’s different, I think, is the scale at which the libertarios are doing this.”

When the military seized power in 1976, Miriam Lewin was a student and an active member of a left-wing group. She was held prisoner in a clandestine prison camp a stone’s throw from Argentina’s national football stadium. She can still recall hearing the wild celebrations of the crowds from her prison cell when the national team won its first World Cup in 1978.

Milei has concerned Lewin and other civil liberties advocates by appearing to downplay the crimes of the dictatorship. He and other members of his administration have cast doubt on estimates of the number of people killed by the dictatorship and have characterised the period as an “internal armed conflict”. Lewin feels it is important to re-tell her story now because of the political situation. “I think that knowing about the death flights is more important than ever because of the kind of government we have,” she explained. “They vindicate the dictatorship.”

Christopher Sabatini, a commentator at Chatham House who founded the journal Americas Quarterly, said there is a risk in threatening the country’s shared historical memory. “In Argentina there is a sense of nunca mas – never again – when it comes to the dictatorship,” he said. “There have always been those apologists for the junta, but they didn’t speak so publicly. Now they are out of the closet a little bit.”

The president’s choice of friends has also fuelled concern. He has made no secret of his courting of President Trump, a leader who cast doubt on a legitimate election result and was accused of encouraging a coup. In December, Argentina hosted CPAC, a conference of right-wing politics, for the first time. Among the speakers was Jair Bolsonaro, the former Brazilian president who has been charged in relation to a coup attempt. “I think it’s a really bad idea to be friends with these people,” said Julio Montero, a professor of politics at the University of San Andrés in Buenos Aires. “These people are not democrats.”

However, even the most ardent critics do not believe Milei would directly threaten democratic election results. Lewin said: “There is a lot of repression in the streets during demonstrations and they do things that were not acceptable [before].” But the sort of mass arrests common during the late 1970s are not happening, she said. “I think the memory of the dictatorship is still very vivid in us, so people just don’t support irrational arrests.” Most of the Argentines who support Milei do so because of his promises to fix the economy rather than his culture war battles, Garcia said. “Trumpism has a base movement with real people – flesh and bones – willing to go and storm into Capitol Hill,” he said. “Milei hasn’t built that yet.”

Threats to Indigenous communities

Thus far, Milei’s route to reshaping Argentina has largely been through policymaking, and he has big plans for the future. Elective abortion access in Argentina was only legalised in 2020 after the protests which became known across Latin America as the Green Wave. Milei has labelled abortion “aggravated murder”, rhetoric that has caused concern about the rights of women and other minorities. Although no concrete steps have been taken to restrict abortion, reports suggest that some healthcare workers have refused to carry out procedures.

Indigenous rights have also been threatened. If there is one sector of the economy that Milei is pinning his hopes on it is mining. Argentina boasts the second largest shale gas deposit in the world and is home to one fifth of the planet’s lithium, a crucial component in electric car batteries. Local governments have been leaned on to approve projects and global investors have been offered significant tax incentives to plough money into Argentina.

But this could be at the expense of local people. Crucially, an emergency law designed to protect indigenous land rights has been annulled. In Mendoza province, the western region famous for its vineyards, the indigenous Mapuche community is fighting 34 mining projects it says it was not properly consulted about. Gabriel Jofré, a Mapuche leader in Mendoza, said that climate change is already making it harder for his people to work the land using traditional techniques. He told the Guardian, “Our territories are an inseparable part of our identity and culture. They are our source of food and traditional medicine.”

Javier Milei is not a dictator. Even his biggest critics do not claim that. But there is legitimate fear for the future of human rights and the economic prospects of Argentinians under what are promised to be even harsher conditions of austerity – Milei has said that the country’s belt needs to be tightened even further this year.

At the same time, his Freedom Advances party is weak in Congress and he has shown some willingness to negotiate and compromise in order to build a broader support base. He will have his eyes firmly fixed on the midterm elections in October. Success in those would go a long way to securing his grip on political power. And of course, the elephant in the room is that a majority of Argentines still support him. His 66 per cent approval rating in December was the highest on the continent – the second highest in the world. For now, at least, this means that the concerns of activists and political opponents are likely to be pushed aside.

“People losing their jobs is a serious reality – but what Milei has done is supported by most Argentines,” said Saldías. “[In 2023] people feared there was a hyperinflation coming. The fact that didn’t happen and inflation fell is a massive change in expectations. His primary promise to the population is being fulfilled.”

However, the extreme cuts he is implementing still represent a risk. In the 1990s, Argentina’s government responded to hyperinflation with a swathe of public spending cuts, privatisations and currency controls. The situation improved – until 2001, when the economy collapsed, access to bank accounts was restricted and wide-scale protests erupted. Some Argentines, weary from decades of boom and bust, might now be watching with a sense that they’ve seen it all before.

This article is from New Humanist's Spring 2025 issue. Subscribe now.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve noticed a few comments here and there asking me what I think about the new COVID vaccination study. And it was weird because I tend to be generally aware of research in that area. Not that I see everything as soon as it’s published, of course, but if something …

This thread has been created for thoughtful, rational discussion on subjects for which there are not currently any dedicated threads. Please note that our Comment Policy applies as usual. There is a link to this at the foot of the page. DISCLAIMER: All comments posted throughout this website are the personal views of users and …

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Today I want to tell you about the absolute WILDEST conspiracy theory with the MOST BORING name possible. Like, seriously, the chasm between the name of this thing and the shit adherents believe would dwarf …

This post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! This week is the fifth anniversary of the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. I mean, depending upon when you prefer to mark it, considering it was, of course, already circulating in late 2019, and the …

Mansour Omari is a Syrian human rights defender, journalist and torture survivor. In 2012, he was detained by the Assad regime for his work documenting the names of people being disappeared and detained. Upon his release a year later, he smuggled out the names of his fellow prisoners, written with blood and rust on scraps of cloth. His story features in the 2017 documentary “Syria’s Disappeared”. He is based in Sweden and has an LLM in Transitional Justice.

The Assad regime fell in December. What does that mean to you?

All of a sudden I have a homeland. I didn’t before. When Assad was controlling Syria I was wanted because of my work with the Syrian Centre for Media and Freedom of Expression, for my work as a journalist and for documenting the detainees’ names. So I couldn’t go back to Syria. It was a dark place. I was born and raised in a Syria ruled by the Assad family. I [didn’t] live in a free country ... Now it’s open and I can go. This is a totally new thing. It takes a lot of thinking and reconsidering.

When Syria was liberated, the doors of the prisons and detention centres were opened and the detainees released. How significant was this?

It equals the fall of the regime for me. When I worked in Syria, I was documenting the detainees and since my own release from detention I’ve been advocating for all the arbitrarily arrested detainees, all political prisoners, to be freed. And suddenly they are all free – except for the tens of thousands who disappeared for ever.

Does it feel like a weight has been lifted?

Yes, exactly. Before I always had a feeling of urgency, because every day that passed by, people were dying in detention. I felt it physically, like something was on my shoulders. This duty to save lives has now ended. I feel lighter. But the number of people released was so much lower than the number documented in detention. [The Syrian Network for Human Rights reported that over 100,000 people held by the Assad regime are still unaccounted for.]

I knew that those who were detained in the early years following 2011 were very unlikely to still be alive ... but didn’t want that to become reality. The majority of the disappeared are nowhere to be found and they must be dead.

Fadel Abdul Ghany, the head of the Syrian Network for Human Rights, broke down on television sharing the news that most of the missing were dead. What did you think of that moment?

I think it was important for Fadel to announce the shocking truth because the Syrian people and the international community must know and face its consequences. I think he absolutely did the right thing. However, this does not mean that families of the disappeared should stop striving for the truth and just accept that their loved ones are dead. Looking for every piece of information about their loved ones is a long path and an essential part of the closure they must reach.

We estimated that the average time a human being lasts in a detention centre is around one year and a half, based on the evidence. If you’re moved to a prison, you can survive for longer, even though Sednaya prison was also hell. I know from my own experience – you get beaten and you get wounds and then those wounds get infected. At first, your infections can heal. But then your body gets weaker and the immune system gets weaker. I never went outside once, I never saw the sun. There was very little food. I lost 38 kilos in detention. I was lucky to be transferred to Adra prison after nine months, but I was like a skeleton.

I wanted to die. When you are tortured daily, the end of your life is salvation. It’s comfort. Almost everybody there wished to die. It was a sincere wish because of the torture and humiliation.

When you left detention, you smuggled out the names of 82 people who were detained with you. Since the fall of Assad, have you found any more of these people?

Not yet. I found six of the names on lists of people which have circulated, showing the date of their detention and the date of death. But my focus now is tracking each and every person on that list to discover their fate, with the help of their families and the government, as we can now access official records.

How many of the 82 do you already have confirmed information about?

Thirteen. And four of those are alive, but I’ve known about those [the survivors] since at least 2015. I don’t expect that any more of them will be alive, and this breaks my heart. I knew them, I lived with them, I ate with them, I was beaten with them. So I want to find out what happened to each of them after I was released. I will write the story of each one. They asked me to help them and I did my best but I couldn’t. Many times they said, “Don’t forget us.” Their stories should be told.

Lots of official documentation is being found in detention centres and prisons. News reports show people rifling through it – what’s happening to secure those documents as evidence?

It’s still not secured. The de facto government should be securing these places because they are crime scenes and evidence must be preserved, including forensic evidence. They should be guarding them, not letting anyone in. One document can contain the names of people held in a specific place and if this piece of paper is ruined, those names could be lost for ever and we’ll never know anything about their fate.

As sites of mass graves are being uncovered in Syria, what should happen? Do you want to see exhumations or for the dead to be left undisturbed and memorialised?

The most common opinion from the Syrian human rights groups and families – and it is my opinion too – is that excavation is important. Every Syrian family who has lost a loved one wants to know where they are. We must have a grave to visit. So they should be excavated, and DNA tested, and every bone should be registered. We should know the numbers killed and the story of every body.

Previously Russia blocked Syria from being referred to the International Criminal Court. What do you think will happen now?

I want to see the first elected Syrian government adopt the Rome Statute [the founding treaty of the ICC], to protect the Syrian people. Syria could then invite the ICC to have a mandate and there would be no need for a Security Council vote [therefore removing Russia’s power to veto].

What are your hopes for justice?

I hope Syrians shape the justice they want. It should be the product of dialogue and negotiation between all Syrian parties. It must rigorously uphold the rights of victims and their families and adhere to international human rights standards. All Syria-related trials in Europe should be live-streamed on Syrian state television with simultaneous Arabic translation provided by the court itself.

Syria must establish a fair judicial system that guarantees freedom from torture and mistreatment. I hope justice will not be delayed, nor be the victor’s justice. It should be justice for all Syrians.

Learn more about the documentary “Syria’s Disappeared” at syriasdisappeared.com.

This article is from New Humanist's Spring 2025 issue. Subscribe now.

From the Richard Dawkins Foundation Newsletter. Subscribe here. Hello! One of the key differences between religion and science is in how each one determines “truth.” Religious “truth” requires nothing more than one’s belief. If God, the Pope, or the Imam says it, it must be so. Case closed.  Science, on the other hand, is based on …

Most people who are overweight want to lose it. But even when they do, it often creeps back. New research may explain why. The study focuses on the epigenome – chemical structures sitting on our DNA that regulate gene activity. Epigenetic signatures can act as a “memory” for our cells, capturing environmental stresses and changes, perhaps even from the womb. Evidence from wartime sugar rationing, for example, suggests maternal diets during pregnancy can programme a child’s propensity for weight gain later in life, likely through epigenetic changes.

Researchers wondered if an “epigenetic memory” within fat cells might also drive the body’s resistance to maintaining weight loss. To investigate, they analysed fat tissue from people with severe obesity who underwent bariatric surgery, which makes the stomach smaller. All patients lost at least 25 per cent of their body weight. Samples from before the surgery and two years after were compared to tissue from lean individuals who had never been obese.

The findings were striking: the fat cells of those who had been obese displayed different gene activity to those who had always been lean. Pathogenic signatures of obesity remained. Genes linked to inflammation and fibrosis were more active, while those associated with healthy fat tissue function were suppressed.

Similar patterns were observed in mice, reinforcing the results. In addition to epigenetic differences, fat cells from formerly obese mice continued to “act obese”: they absorbed more sugar and fat and regained weight faster on a high-fat diet than cells from lean mice. How long this “metabolic memory” persists is unknown.

This latest research contributes to an important and growing body of evidence that obesity isn’t about will power. Innovations such as Ozempic and other weight-loss drugs offer hope for severely obese individuals, but long-term success requires more than just treatment. It’s a complex challenge shaped by biology, environment and even the “memories” of our cells. With insights like these, we’re closer to removing the stigma and addressing the challenge of obesity effectively and equitably.

This article is from New Humanist's Spring 2025 issue. Subscribe now.

As the world pivots toward decarbonisation, interest in lithium is skyrocketing. Global demand for this “white gold”, used in rechargeable batteries, is expected to reach 4 million tonnes by 2030, driven by electric vehicle adoption and global net-zero commitments. This rapid increase brings challenges, particularly in diversifying lithium sources and minimising the environmental footprint of extraction.

Currently, most lithium comes from hard rock mining or brine sources. Brine extraction in South America’s “lithium triangle” involves pumping lithium-rich saltwater up from underground reservoirs into vast evaporation ponds. Over months or even years, the Sun evaporates the water, leaving lithium-bearing salts behind. While cost-effective, this current method disrupts local ecosystems and consumes vast amounts of water – a particular problem in areas already grappling with water scarcity. There’s an urgent search for more sustainable extraction methods, and recent innovations offer hope.

A groundbreaking device developed by Baoxia Mi at the University of California and Jia Zhu at Nanjing University could revolutionise the field. The device, powered by sunlight, floats on briny water and extracts lithium passively. Inspired by the way trees draw water upward through pressure gradients, the device uses solar-driven evaporation to draw water into its structure. Lithium-rich brine is pulled through porous membranes that selectively allow lithium ions to pass while blocking larger, contaminating ions like sodium.

Prototypes have shown this type of extraction to be far more efficient than the current method, harvesting about 30 milligrams of lithium per day per square meter of the device. Although this may seem modest, scaling up could deliver significant results. Covering just 1 per cent of California’s 800 km² Salton Sea – recently discovered to hold vast lithium reserves – could generate enough lithium for around 250,000 mobile phone batteries daily.

As demand for lithium grows, advancements like this are essential to ensure that the shift to cleaner energy is made responsibly.

This article is from New Humanist's spring 2025 issue. Subscribe now.

Ammonia (NH3) is a common chemical here on Earth. It’s in fertiliser, refrigerator coolant and even some biological waste – if you’ve ever cleaned a fish tank, you’re surely familiar with the molecule’s scent. It’s also common beyond our planet, as its component elements of nitrogen and hydrogen are both readily produced in stars. Astronomers first spotted ammonia floating in the spaces between stars around 1970.

Now Nasa’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) appears to have made the first detection of ammonia on an exoplanet (a world orbiting a star other than the Sun). Around 57 light years away and with a temperature of about 500 degrees Kelvin (equivalent to about 227 degrees Celsius), GJ 504 b is one of the coldest exoplanets ever to be photographed, as they usually need to be young and warm for us to image them.

However, we’re still not certain whether GJ 504 b really is a planet or not. Astronomers think it may be a large gas giant planet about four times Jupiter’s mass, or it could be a brown dwarf, which is a bit too big to be a planet but not large enough to sustain fusion like a star. That’s where ammonia comes in: this key molecule helps narrow down GJ 504 b’s size, and therefore its mass. The JWST data suggest that GJ 504 b is, in fact, small enough to be called “planet-sized”, but more observations are needed to be sure.

Only JWST can provide those additional observations, and only JWST could possibly have made this confident detection of ammonia in the first place. The space telescope’s mid-infrared MIRI instrument was designed to find the NH3 predicted to linger in planetary atmospheres, and its capabilities open a door to imaging planets at longer wavelengths than was previously possible. This provides a treasure trove for scientists looking to understand the atmospheres of giant exoplanets, which in turn helps narrow down how these planets could have formed in the first place.

JWST has already made a number of other spectacular observations, including sandy silicate clouds on the exoplanet VHS 1256 b and an atmosphere quite similar to Jupiter’s on another, Epsilon Indi Ab. And with 20 or more years left in its scientific lifetime, there are sure to be more discoveries to come.

This article is from New Humanist's Spring 2025 issue. Subscribe now.

As I’ve mentioned here before, I am on BlueSky, and overall I quite like it. Friendly interface, effective tools for curating your feed and/or blocking and muting people, and most of the people I liked to follow on Xitter are now active there. But one issue I have with it is, I think, related to …

This thread has been created for thoughtful, rational discussion on subjects for which there are not currently any dedicated threads. Please note that our Comment Policy applies as usual. There is a link to this at the foot of the page. DISCLAIMER: All comments posted throughout this website are the personal views of users and …

From the Richard Dawkins Foundation Newsletter. Subscribe here. Hello! This year will mark the 100th anniversary of the famous Scopes “Monkey Trial,” in which Tennessee high school teacher John Scopes was prosecuted for the outrageous act of … teaching the theory of human evolution. Out of the state’s own authorized textbook! Still, this violated the Butler …

This is the 2025 follow-on from the 2024 BOOK CLUB thread, which is now closed, though you can easily refer back to earlier discussions by clicking on the link. BOOK CLUB 2025 has been created to provide a dedicated space for the discussion of books. Pretty much any kind of book – it doesn’t have …

The Edinburgh Magic Festival takes place soon, and I am staging a few events, including a talk on the magical history of Edinburgh, a magic workshop (joint with slight of hand expert Will Houstoun), and my ‘Invention of Magic’ show. For details, please click here. 

As part of the event, I have teamed up with Festival co-founder Svetlana McMahon and the amazing Young Carers charity to produce a fun optical illusion exhibition. Together, we created some mind-bending illusions, and then photographed the carers staging the images around the city. Each photograph features young carers doing what they do every day – making the seemingly impossible possible. 

If you are in Edinburgh, please pop into the Storytelling Center on the High Street, enjoy the free exhibition and watch our behind-the-scenes video. Here are a few of my favourite images….

 

I recently received a lovely email from a pal of mine, Ian Franklin. We met when I investigated alleged ghostly phenomena at Hampton Court Palace, and so I thought that it would be a good time to re-visit the work.

As a kid, I was fascinated by ghosts and hauntings. In the 1990s, I obtained a PhD in the psychology of the paranormal from Edinburgh University and then started my own research unit at the University of Hertfordshire. One day, I received a curious letter from Hampton Court Palace.

This historic Palace has been home to many British monarchs and is now a popular tourist attraction. It also has a reputation for being haunted, with many people experiencing unusual phenomena in an area now known as ‘The Haunted Gallery’. The letter invited me to carry out an investigation (the first at a Royal Palace).

I put together a team of researchers (Caroline Watt, Paul Stevens, Emma Greening and Ciarán O’Keeffe) for a five-day investigation. It proved to be lots of fun. For instance, before we started, the Palace staged a press conference to announce my study. During a break, I stepped outside to get some fresh air and some teenagers drove past. Weirdly, one of them threw an egg at me and it smashed on my shirt, leaving a large stain.  I returned to the press conference, said that the stain was actually ghostly ectoplasm and that this is going to be a tough investigation. 

At the time, Ian Franklin was working as a palace warder. He was kind enough to go through the historic records and figure out where people had reported unusual phenomena in the Haunted Gallery.   

Each day, I asked visitors to walk through the Gallery and write down any unusual experienced (e.g., suddenly feeling cold or sensing a presence). They were also given a floorplan of the area and asked to indicate the location of their experience. About 600 people participated. Interestingly, the experiences from those who believed in ghosts tended to take place in areas that Ian had identified from historic reports. Before the study, we had asked everyone to rate their previous knowledge about strange happenings in the Haunted Gallery, and we could see that that wasn’t a factor.

So, what was going on? We discovered that some of the experiences were caused by natural phenomena (e.g., subtle draughts), and speculated that others might be due to areas looking dark and scary. But who knows, maybe there actually are ghosts at the Palace! Importantly, the work showed that it was possible to carry out a rational and open-minded investigation into an alleged haunting, and it paved the way for my later ghost work (more about that in another blog post). Alas, little did I know that there would soon be lots of people (including those on TV) carrying out somewhat less scientific investigations into alleged ghostly phenomena!

Anyway, it was wonderful working with Ian, and the journal article about the study is here, and it also described in Paranormality. 

This week we will take a detailed look at an optical illusion that I created to shrink people.

There are a few ways of making someone look small. One approach involves making everything else big! Here is a great example of that from a Trick Eye exhibition in Japan. The picture is huge and the glass is painted on the back walls (I pressed my hands against the ground beforehand, so that they looked like they were being pushed against the glass).

Another approach involves forced perspective (making a far-away object appear much closer to the camera) – a technique used in the famous Beuchet Chair illusion….

It’s wonderful but is still a big build. I wanted to create something that was far more portable, and had the idea of moving the chair very close to the camera. Here is how this new illusion looks and works.

All of the details and templates were published in the journal iPerception and I was especially happy with the article because that’s my mum in the photos! I have used the idea lots over the years, ….

….including in this quirky video……

Next week I will reveal a brand new optical illusion! Oh, and if you are in Edinburgh, I will be giving a talk on the 28^th December at MagicFest about the strange intertwined lives of three master magicians from the city. One was the most famous illusionist in the world, another perfected a trick that revolutionised magic, and the third was frequently asked to appear in the Edinburgh Sheriff Court. Do come along, fun will be had. Details here.

Welcome to another Thursday post celebrating curious mind stuff. This week, we enter the world of illusion! 

I have created many optical illusions over the years, and I am fortunate enough to be friends with some of the smartest and most inventive folks in the field. Olivier Redon is certainly one of those people. Working with his daughter Chloe, Olivier creates new illusions and wonderful twists to existing ideas. A generous soul, his pieces are as playful as they are fooling.

Here is his Oh La La Box, which won the Best Illusion of the Year in 2021. Simple but brilliant….. 

A man after my own heart, most of Olivier’s creations are built from cardboard and paper, and show how to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. In another instance, the dynamic duo have joined books and boxes together in impossible ways….

Our paths first crossed when I created a version of the Beuchet Chair, only to discover that Olivier had had pretty much the same idea several years ago (mine involves an addition of a fake cloth to help with the illusion of continuity)!  
Olivier has also used the same idea to make objects shrink and grow in desktop version. Genius. Olivier is based in San Francisco and creates for the fun of making something new and the joy of sharing it with younger minds. Who knows, perhaps there will be a museum dedicated to his work. 

I asked Olivier three key questions about his work…

How do you find your creative ideas? 
Very interesting question. At first, I paid attention to what was around me. But then, over time, I noticed that there were no big changes in the world of optical illusions, and so I decided to do something about it and create something new myself. Now I have more than 50 optical illusions that fill 3 rooms in my house!

Who are your heroes of the world of optical illusions?
Jerry Andrus, because he invented so much, yet had no computer or printer! He just worked with metal, cardboard, or wood. I found Jerry Andrus via the internet in 2022, but I didn’t know him before that because I wanted to create my illusions without knowing about what already existed.

Should all the classrooms in the world have optical illusions? 
Of course! It is so much fun to play with your brain and especially for adults, children, teachers and students.     

You can find out about Olivier’s great work here and read more about it in this article.

What do you think? Leave a comment and let us know.

Another Thursday, another dose of curious stuff. Here is a strange tale combining magic, a trip to Paris, and some remarkable photographs.

In the early 1890s, French scientist Alfred Binet teamed up with several magicians (including sleight of hand expert Edouard-Joseph Raynaly) and photographer Georges Demeny to discover how magic fooled the mind. Demeny had helped to create an early type of film camera and was using it to analyse fast movements by reducing them to a series of rapidly taken still photographs. His clockwork camera could move 24 frames past a lens at the rate of one every tenth of a second. Publishing the results in an 1894 article, Binet describes how the images removed the magician’s patter and speed of movement, and so exposed the illusions. The photographs were not reproduced in Binet’s article, but it did contain a curious note explaining that they were ‘stored in laboratory records.’

I came across Binet’s article when I was writing my PhD on magic. A few years later, I decided to search for the missing images. I first contacted an expert on early film, Professor Marta Braun (Toronto Metropolitan University).  Marta wasn’t aware of the images, but suggested that I reach out to an archivist at the French National Library named Laurent Mannoni. After several weeks of discussions and searching, Laurent discovered 3 sets of Binet’s images in the archive. I headed to Paris!

Once in the archive, Laurent led me into a darkened room filled with amazing objects, including Demeny’s camera, apparatus from the famous French magician Robert-Houdin and the 3 sets of images! These images were breath-taking and involved Raynaly springing cards between his hands (11 images), changing one playing card into another (11 images) and making a ball vanish (24 images). Laurent kindly allowed me to make digital copies of the photographs. On the train back to the UK, a thought occurred to me. If I were to present each set of images in rapid succession, I could recreate Raynaly’s performance from over a century ago! So that’s what I did and here is one of the films.

The film shows Raynaly dropping the ball from one hand to another, passing back into his upper hand and then the ball vanishing. Don’t blink or you will miss it! Historians often cite 1896 footage of British magician David Devant as the earliest film of a conjurer, but Demeny’s film predates Devant’s footage by at least two years. I have shown the Raynaly film at many conferences and conventions, and he always receives a much-deserved round of applause!

So, there you have it. A magical detective story borne of curiosity and luck, that ended up uncovering the world’s earliest film of a magician.  What do you think? It’s easy to imagine none of this happening. What if the article hadn’t stuck in my mind. Or Maria hadn’t been as helpful? Or Laurent hadn’t been as generous? But I am glad that it did.

Further reading:

Binet, A. (1894). Psychology of prestidigitation. Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution (pp.555–571). Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.

Lachapelle S. (2008). From the stage to the laboratory: magicians, psychologists, and the science of illusion. Journal of the history of the behavioral sciences, 44(4), 319–334. https://doi.org/10.1002/jhbs.20327

Thomas, C., & Didierjean, A. (2016). Scientific Study of Magic: Binet’s Pioneering Approach Based on Observations and Chronophotography. The American journal of psychology, 129, 313–326. https://doi.org/10.5406/amerjpsyc.129.3.0313

All images except Binet, copyright Richard Wiseman

check, 1, 2…is this thing on? hi everyone! it’s been a while.

Someone contacted me hoping to find young atheists who might be interested in being part of a new series. I’m not particularly interested in having my mug on TV, but I would love to have some great personalities represent atheism on the show, so I offered to repost his email on my blog: My name […]

All throughout my youth, I dreamed of becoming a writer. I wrote all the time, about everything. I watched TV shows and ranted along with the curmudgeons on Television Without Pity about what each show did wrong, convincing myself that I could do a better job. I flew to America with a dream in my […]

A friend linked me to this. I was a sobbing mess within the first minute. I sometimes wonder why I feel such a strong kinship to the LGBT community, and I think it’s because I’ve been through the same thing that many of them have. So I watched this video and I cried, because, as […]

UPDATE #1: I got my domain back! Many thanks to Kurtis for the pleasant surprise: So I stumbled upon your blog, really liked what I saw, read that you had drama with the domain name owner, bought it, and forwarded it here. It should work again in a matter of seconds. I am an atheist […]