Tag: biology

Scientists Grew Microbes In Mars-Like Conditions – And They Didn’t Just Survive…

Salt-loving microbes kept for months in a lab version of the Martian underground did more than hang on. They grew, according to a study from University of Florida researchers published in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology, in what lead author Adam Robinson says adds to “the growing body of evidence suggesting that we should consider the possibility of life on Mars today.”

The microbe is Haloferax volcanii, a salt-loving archaeon found in places like the Dead Sea and Utah’s Great Salt Lake, and a standard stand-in for life that could survive on other planets. According to the Daily Mail, Robinson’s team held it for 180 days in a solution seven times saltier than seawater, with almost no oxygen, a carbon dioxide atmosphere at a small fraction of Earth’s pressure, and either nitrates or perchlorates, chemicals found on Mars that can stand in for oxygen. Cultures given either chemical fed and reproduced; cultures given neither showed no noticeable growth.

Each hazard has been tested alone before, and some studies have shown microbes can cling on for months under several at once. Robinson said “far fewer have been able to combine these conditions together and show that microorganisms can actively grow.” A preprint on what appears to be the same experiment, posted on bioRxiv and summarized by Astrobiology.com, describes 160 days at no more than 24 millibars, a 99.9% CO2 atmosphere and 21 degrees Celsius. It reports growth in every low-pressure treatment, shown by rising optical density and by the microbes breaking down nitrate and perchlorate, and calls it the first demonstration of a halophilic archaeon growing under that combination.

The microbes also appear to have protected their water. They formed biofilms, clumps encased in a slimy protective layer, and lost very little water over the months-long run; the preprint puts water loss below 4%. Growth was far slower than in Earth-like conditions, but the colonies kept growing.

Robinson was careful about what it does not show.

“I would not say this study suggests there is definitely life on Mars today,” he said.

“However, this work adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting that the shallow subsurface of Mars may still retain environmental conditions conducive to active metabolism and extant life.”

The lab also did not perfectly recreate every danger Martian life would face, and surviving on Mars is hard because cold, salt, radiation and thin air all hit at once.

Robinson told the Daily Mail that if Mars once hosted life, some organisms may have evolved to tolerate increasingly hostile conditions as the planet changed.

“If life from Earth can grow under hostile conditions it has never naturally encountered, what might potential life on Mars look like after billions of years of evolution under those conditions?” he asked.

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Sex Differences: Perspectives from Biology, Medicine, and Psychiatry

Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret.

–Horace, Epistles, 1:10

The above epigraph, a Latin proverb from the poet Horace, translates, “You can try to drive out nature with a pitchfork, yet nature will always return.” Or as my colleague Bill Hurlbut at Stanford University, a physician and ethicist, likes to say, “Human nature always bats in the bottom of the ninth inning.”

My purpose here is to look at what science, medicine, and psychiatry can tell us about biological differences between men and women and some of the implications for those differences beyond simply our role in reproduction.

Biology and Sex Differences

Sex differences between men and women are not confined to the reproductive organs. They run through all levels of human biology—from subtle features of organs and tissues to differences on the cellular and molecular level. It turns out that aside from our reproductive organs, the most sexually differentiated human organ is the brain. The differences are not just physical but also psychological, influencing our cognitive, behavioral, and emotional functioning.

There are important and measurable sex differences in our experience of emotion, memory, vision, and hearing. Men and women differ in our perceptual processing of faces, in pain perception, navigation, neurotransmitter levels in our brain, and the effects of stress hormones our bodies. We are prone to different diseases, and we respond differently to the same medical treatments.

Many of these differences are innate rather than acquired—they are present from before birth and persist throughout life. Keep in mind also that these differences are subtle, and we should not exaggerate them, as sometimes happens in popular treatments of this issue—“Men are from Mars and women are from Venus,” and so forth.

There is also considerable intrasex variation—sex traits exist on a bell curve, with considerable overlap between the sexes. One mistake that gender ideology makes is the notion that a man with some characteristically feminine traits or interests is “really a woman,” and vice versa. This is not true: he is simply a man at the tail end of this normally distributed bell curve—a boy who likes ballet, or a girl who likes football. That’s all.

Gender ideology fails to acknowledge the full extent of intrasex variation (and overlap between the sexes) in gender-specific traits. In this way, transgenderism ironically “defines” male and female too narrowly.

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Plant Biology Textbooks Seeded With Insidious Misogyny, Claims Gender-Expansive Academic

As the political commentariat is awash in hyperbole, dismissing the oft-noted truism that the progressive left and their sponsors in academia/corporate America/government are “at war with nature/reality” as hyperbole is easy.

How hyperbolic is it, though, really?

Exhibit A:

Contexts is an ostensibly, self-styled professional journal that “makes cutting-edge sociology research accessible to journalists, policymakers, sociologists, and general readers,” released recently a progressive missive masquerading as a scientific study documenting and denouncing, in one go, the “rape culture” endemic to the textbook publishing industry, specifically as it pertains to plant descriptions in biology textbooks.

Cutting-edge!

Via Contexts:

“Scientific stories about plant reproduction often draw on gender stereotypes and myth, making such myths appear natural. Based on an analysis of introductory biology textbooks, the authors demonstrate how the authors of these books cast male plants and plant parts as active heroes while portraying their female counterparts as passive, reluctant, or sometimes even deceptive…

Although we often describe plant reproduction in human terms, its biological reality in fact differs dramatically from our own…

However, popular and even scientific accounts of plant reproduction rarely depict the process in this manner. Instead, biology textbook authors describe plant reproduction through a set of habitually repeated stories that reliably draw on conventional gender stereotypes, reflecting those found in mainstream accounts of human reproduction. In doing so, they cast male plants and plant parts as active heroes—delivering, competing, accomplishing—and portray their female counterparts as passive, reluctant, or sometimes even deceptive.

When textbook authors rely on everyday narratives about women and men to explain plant sex, they make myths about gender difference appear inevitable and natural…

These patterns reflect broader systems of power and inequality that we often take for granted as normal or commonsensical. When scientists repeatedly link activity, independence, and success with masculinity, and passivity, dependence, or even failure with femininity, they communicate these gender myths to students, scientific communities, and the public.”

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Trump Junks Biden’s Title IX Rules, Now Defines Sex by Biology

The Department of Education said Monday it will formally remove the Biden administration’s Title IX regulations and restore rules issued during President Donald Trump’s first term.

The change takes effect Tuesday. Under the final rule issued Monday, the Education Department’s anti-discrimination policy will recognize sex as male or female at birth. It formally removes Biden-era regulations that extended protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity to students and employees at federally funded schools.

The 2024 rules also forced schools to use transgender students’ pronouns and changed how schools handle harassment complaints. A federal court struck down the rules in January 2025.

The Education Department then told schools it would enforce the 2020 rules. Monday’s action puts that change into the published federal regulations; schools have already been operating under the earlier rules.

The department said the last lawsuits over the Biden rules were dismissed in August, clearing the way for it to formally remove them. Education Secretary Linda McMahon said the move would make the written regulations match the court rulings and the rules her department has been enforcing since Trump returned to office:

Today’s rulemaking clears the Biden Administration’s illegal rewrite of Title IX from the Code of Federal Regulations and restores the commonsense language promulgated in the first Trump Administration, which we have been enforcing since the first days of the Administration. Thanks to today’s action, the published Title IX regulations faithfully reflects court orders and Congressional intent—reducing confusion for parents, students, and educational institutions. We will continue to relentlessly champion equal opportunity for all Americans and hold accountable any school or college that violates the rights, privacy, or athletic opportunities of our women and girls.

The rule follows a 2025 executive order from Trump directing federal agencies to recognize only male and female as sexes and apply that definition when enforcing laws against sex discrimination.

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‘Biology and science is offensive?’ Watch WNBA fans get ordered to conceal their XX-XY T-shirts

America’s well-known freedom speech, which actually protects even offensive language be, uhm, darned!

A security guard at a WNBA game between the Indiana Fever and the Atlanta Dream has imposed his own, and presumably the team’s, speech code on fans.

That is, that they are not allowed to have scientific facts emblazoned on their T-shirts. Cover up or begone, he orders.

It is in a report posted by Fox that the details appear:

The report explains Kasey Thomason and daughter Annie had tickets just two rows back from the court, and they chose to wear XX-XY Athletics T-shirt to support Sophie Cunningham “and the ongoing fight to keep women’s sports and spaces female.”

Through much of the action there was no difficulty.

Then overtime, and a security guard appeared. He ordered them to cover their shirts or leave.

The report explained the guard claimed that other “fan(s)” were offended so they could wear the Atlanta Dream “Wellness & Health Night” shirts or be taken out of the building by escort.

Kasey wondered, so “biology and science is offensive?”

Mother and daughter “reluctantly” agreed to put on the offered shirts so they didn’t miss the end of the game.

Then, the report pointed out, “the Thomasons are seen on the ESPN broadcast with the tan Dream shirts in hand. They can be seen talking to fans around them, who they said loved their shirts and showed support for them and Cunningham throughout the game.”

The report said the prohibited items at State Farm Arena include, “Clothing, garments or signs displaying explicit language, profanity or derogatory characterization towards any person(s).”

Fox reported, “If State Farm Arena and the Atlanta Dream were really trying to claim the shirts worn by the Thomasons were a ‘derogatory characterization’ or ‘indecent messages’ on clothing, that would be an arbitrary way of enforcing their rules, at best. Discrimination, at the worst. But the fact remains, the security guard didn’t claim any of these things from the prohibited items list or the Fan Code of Conduct. He just said the shirts were ‘offensive.'”

Kasey told Fox she assumes a “trans rights” promoter sitting at courtside had complained.

The Fox report said, “This whole situation is discriminatory, disgusting, and quite frankly, Orwellian. In no shape, manner, or form, is a shirt that displays four prominent letters, representing a biological truth that women have XX chromosomes and men have XY chromosomes, ‘offensive.'”

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Transgender ‘experts’ just made an earth-shattering admission in court

Democrats, activist groups, and medical associations have long cited the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s Standards of Care as the ultimate authority on a scientific “consensus” for sex-rejecting procedures, but WPATH just made an admission in court that threatens to undermine that exalted authority.

The Federal Trade Commission and four state attorneys general sued WPATH in June, alleging that the association engaged in deceptive practices by promoting “gender-affirming care” that causes harm to patients, particularly minors who cannot provide informed consent. Late last month, WPATH urged the court to dismiss the lawsuit, claiming that the government was retaliating because it disagreed with the association’s protected speech.

The association defended its Standards of Care as “opinion” protected by the First Amendment on subjects considering “medical and scientific uncertainty” in a debate with more than one reasonable position. The group also cited a Supreme Court ruling that upheld state laws forbidding “gender-affirming care“—a decision WPATH itself has loudly condemned in the past.

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The Left Can’t Erase Moms And Dads, No Matter How Hard They Try

This past month, our organization, Them Before Us, put up a handful of billboards across the country with a message that has been uncontroversial for all of recorded history: “No child has two dads. No child has two moms.”

Within days, LGBT activists were organizing against them, trying to bully the billboard company, raising funds for counterprotests, and lobbing accusations at our organization, calling us a hate group. The collective outrage has now begun trending on X, drawing millions of views across platforms, thousands of comments, and tens of thousands of likes in just a few short days. All of that fury is aimed at a sentence that every person alive knows to be true, because every person alive arrived here through one biological mother and one biological father.

The rage begins to make sense once you understand why these words pose such a threat to a certain ideology. “Mother” and “father” are real words with real definitions that carry real responsibilities anchored to the creation of a child. If we turn “mother” and “father” into feelings, into roles anybody can claim or set aside, we allow adults to abdicate (or sell) their responsibility by way of this redefinition, detaching them from the children they have created. These detached children then sit in a legal limbo, waiting to be assigned to whichever adults the state sees fit. This transformation from a person who needs protecting to an asset that needs allocating is a project extremists across history have long dreamt about.

Children have always come into the world making a claim on the adults around them. If a parent takes home a child, refuses to care for her, and the child is injured as a result, we do not arrest the nurse who sent her home or the neighbor across the street. We arrest the mother or father, because built into how we define a child is a biological responsibility laid at the feet of the people responsible for her creation. That definition is how every child has always known who she is, whose she is, and what she is owed: to be known and loved by her mother and father.

Now, our billboard detractors were quick to recite a list they thought disproved biology: children growing up in divorced homes; those who no longer have a father or mother on earth due to death; and those said to have multiple mothers or fathers because of stepparents, blended families, or adoption.

Their concerns highlight an unfortunate reality: Millions of children do live without or apart from their biological parents. But every situation on that list is also a result of a circumstance nobody premeditated or desired. Society has long recognized this and even constructed a process in response to the worst of these tragedies, called adoption, which is a process for a child who has already lost his or her mother or father and sees those responsibilities pass to two vetted adults. Adoption honors the biological definition rather than undermining it, because it begins by admitting the child lost something.

On the other hand, this new regime of redefinition deliberately deprives a child of her mother or father before she is born, through purchased eggs, purchased sperm, and rented wombs. This is not a difference in degree, but in kind: a market in which the child is the product of adult manufacture and state assignment.

Just this past week, news broke that Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier was intervening in a surrogacy case that shows this ideology carried to its logical end. A single man in China rented the womb of a Florida woman, and when she gave birth to his triplets, he never came. Their birth was met with silence. The death of one of the boys from RSV complications was met with the same silence. For 20 months, the woman cared for the boys; then, the moment she moved to terminate his parental rights and adopt the survivors, the Chinese national hired a lawyer, who has since had the two boys pulled from the only woman they have ever known and placed in foster care while he fights to ship them to a country from which no court could ever bring them back.

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TRIGGER WARNING: NBC News Grovels to Viewers for Using Terms ‘Biological Male’ and ‘Biological Female’ in Report About SCOTUS Ruling on Trans Athletes 

When NBC News reported on the Supreme Court decision on transgender athletes in sports today, journalist Craig Melvin fell all over himself top explain that he was using the terms ‘biological male’ and ‘biological female’ because that is the language the court used in the ruling.

He did not come right out and tell viewers that he was giving them a trigger warning but this is exactly what a trigger warning looks like. It was like he was apologizing to viewers for using these words.

This is how far we have gone down this ridiculously stupid road. Journalists on TV are afraid of offending the audience with completely normal and non-offensive words.

NewsBusters reports:

NBC News debased itself Tuesday with its Special Report on the Supreme Court decision allowing state bans of transgenderism in sports to remain in place, delivering a trigger warning about the use of “biological male” and “biological female” as well as scoffing at President Trump for “boil[ing] it down into bumper sticker language” when it’s unclear men have advantages over women and more care should be shown to a “deeply personal issue” that involves a “small” number of people…

Today co-host Craig Melvin also embarrassed himself with Orwellian verbiage, posing what seemed to be a trigger warning for any trans person watching: “Just a quick note here. The terms that we’re using here during our reporting, biological male, biological female, the high court put those terms in quotations in their decision and their dissent. But just so you know, we’re using those terms from the decision itself, biological male, biological female.”

Melvin should consult both Genesis 1 and 5 as well as Matthew 19 to name a few chapters in the Bible laying out male and female.

Jarrett thankfully returned and dispensed with analysis of the ruling without the ludicrous rhetorical throat-clearing.

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SCOTUS To Decide If Free Speech Applies To Biology-Affirming Therapists And Their Clients

n Oct. 7, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral argument in Chiles v. Salazar. This is the latest in a seemingly unending series of cases from Colorado that my colleagues at Alliance Defending Freedom have argued. The cases stem from the state’s apparent aversion to the First Amendment.

Not content with their failed attempts to coerce speech from artists like Jack Phillips of Masterpiece Cakeshop or Lorie Smith of 303 Creative, and not deterred by clear rebukes from the Supreme Court in those cases, the state of Colorado has set its sights on professional counselors.

The law in question bans specific, voluntary counseling conversations, silences the viewpoint disfavored by the government, and leaves struggling youth and their parents with only one government-approved option. Colorado’s law bans counselors like Kaley Chiles from helping minors realign their thoughts and feelings with their biological sex — even when that is the young person’s goal for counseling.

Counseling that affirms so-called “gender transition” is fine by Colorado. Counseling that affirms biological reality is fined by Colorado, up to $5,000 per offense, and could include the loss of licensure.

This is not just an esoteric debate for law school faculty lounges; children’s health and well-being are at stake. Colorado’s defense of this blatant viewpoint discrimination and government censorship hinges on the contention, without a hint of irony, that the state is regulating conduct, not speech. How do Kaley Chiles and her clients engage in the “conduct” of talk therapy without it being speech? Perhaps a high-stakes game of charades? The notion would be laughable if the consequences were not so serious.

If government places an authoritarian thumb on the scale, allowing only one viewpoint, invading the vulnerable space between counselor and client, and dictating one outcome, the victims are children and their families. If the Supreme Court does not protect the speech of counselors like Kaley Chiles and her clients, children in Colorado and more than 20 other states with similar censorship laws will be trapped on a one-way journey to the perils of “gender transition.”

The eventual destination is one of irreversible physical damage, potential sterilization, and a lifetime of being a patient. Our nation’s struggling youth deserve compassionate counseling directed by their goals with assistance from loving parents and professionals, not a government-sponsored pathway to chemicals and surgeries that can leave permanent mental and physical scars.

Adding rhetorical insult to injury is the fact that under Colorado’s law, counseling clients to align their feelings with their biology is deemed “conversion therapy,” while counseling a client to transition from his or her sex to the opposite sex is “gender affirming care.” The assault on common sense and the English language may pale in comparison to the harm suffered by Chiles and her clients, but the First Amendment protects speech because words matter, truth matters, and any attempt by government to silence citizens matters.

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Basic biology has become blasphemy – a call for true Canadian physicians

“I would beg the wise and learned fathers [of the church] to consider with all diligence the difference which exists between matters of mere opinion and matters of demonstration.”

Galileo Galilei.

What has Canadian health care come to? We could be talking about how an estimated 28,000 Canadians died on waitlists last year for surgeries and diagnostic scans. Canada is the only developed country that imposes a government run monopoly on citizens to get health care.

We could talk about how Canadian medical school admissions to train doctors have become about woke bigotry instead of merit. Canadians just want the best doctors – whatever their background.

No. The latest debacle of health care amounts to radicals toppling the leadership of Canadian evidence-based medicine at McMaster University.

As a result, I will describe three main aspects to this story. First, it has become apparent that our institutions have been hi-jacked by the equivalent of a woke church that cannot be questioned. Second, I will describe how other countries have dealt with this affront to common sense – in particular gender ideology. Finally, I will describe a call to action for true Canadian physicians – to bring back empirical scientific method and to end compelled speech.

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