Dispatches From Turtle Island

The Treaty of Kadesh signed around 1269 BCE is the oldest known peace treaty, and a new fragment of it found recently relates to the treatment of refugees.

Other studies have strongly suggested that galaxy rotation curves remain flat indefinitely for as far as they can be observed.

This is a question and my answer from the Physics Forums (officially written at the graduate school level, but dumbed down since the question indicates that the person asking isn't actually that sophisticated and knowledgable.

UPDATE: I previously blogged this same paper closer to when it came out in 2025.

The Vedic religion of South Asia, which ultimately gave rise to modern Hinduism, can be understood as a mash-up of the proto-Indo-European pantheon, which also influenced Nordic/Germanic and Greco-Roman polytheism, with an indigenous Harappan religious su…

The dating of the start of star formation at z = 15 by extrapolating from James Webb Space Telescope observations, rather than merely relying on theory, is a big deal that provides a benchmark for cosmologists trying to fit their models of star and galaxy…

The first twelve episode cours of the anime Red River a.k.a.

I'm highly skeptical of a study that purports to contradict decades of previous observational data whose results had a broad consensus in the field of galaxy dynamics (and which was the main motivator for dark matter particle models such as self-interacti…

A new study of a T-Rex tooth has determined that these dinosaurs were warm blooded, unlike almost all reptiles today (except leatherback sea turtles and Argentine black and white tegus), but like modern birds, which are the sole surviving branch of dinosa…

The Fermi-LAT collaboration looks for signals of dark matter annihilations.

Muonic Helium is an atom made up of a helium atom nucleus with one electron and one muon, rather than two electrons.

A first installment on the non-vanilla hadron blogging project that I mentioned in a previous post notes a new review article on the topic.

Lots of dark matter models of galaxies rely on baryonic feedback (i.e. influence from ordinary matter) to account for its distributions.

While detection of neutrinoless double beta decay is a sign that neutrinos are Majorana particles, neutrinoless quadruple beta decay in the absence of neutrinoless double beta decay is a sign that neutrinos have Dirac mass.

A 92 year old retired math professor (a woman), and a 15 year old girl, who both live in the same neighborhood in Manhattan, solve an important unsolved problem in the topology of knot theory together (via Not Even Wrong which links to the New York Times,…

One of my long-standing to dos for a blog post, which keeps getting put off because it is a pretty big project, is to survey the current state of the literature regarding hadron and/or hadron molecule resonances that aren't simple pseudo-scalar valance qu…

The maxim "today's morphology is yesterday's syntax," coined by linguist Thomas Givon, means that grammatical word endings and affixes (morphology) evolve over time from separate, independent words once used together in phrases and sentences (syntax).

A new study makes a state of the art prediction of the Higgs boson pair production rate from gluon fusion in the Standard Model.

A useful way to think about the history and pre-history of Europe and West Asia since the Last Glacial Maximum is to frame it as a matter of techno-linguistic-cultural waves and layers.

From here.

The Lux-Zepplin direct dark matter experiment has detected a single event that could be a dark matter particle (see also here).

Stacy McGaugh explains at his blog, Triton Station, how important it is to consider the external field effect (in which external gravitational fields prevent MOND effects from arising) when using astronomy data to determine if MOND is a good description of

* John Hawks makes a pretty convincing case, from several studies using different methodologies but reaching similar conclusions, that about 1.1 to 1.5 million years ago, hominins split into two populations, the smaller of which (about 20% of the total) w…

It is worth noting that none of the complexities below involve anything more sophisticated that pre-calculus study and logs and trig functions, and perhaps the early part of a first course in calculus, both of which are often taught at the high school lev…

A new analysis constrains the properties of a hypothetical X17 particle using experimental measurements of muon g-2 and electron g-2.

Artificial intelligence programs have recent disproved some famous mathematical conjectures by finding counter-examples.

Razib Khan's latest piece on human evolution in his Unsupervised Learning series takes a step back and looks at how the big picture has changed with new discoveries made in the last several decades.

This article supports the highly plausible theory that all humans share pre-Out of Africa admixture with "ghost" archaic hominin populations, but the methodology used is fairly new and untested.

Spin-foam is a quantum gravity approach that quantizes space-time, rather than treating gravity as a separate force with a carrier boson comparable to a photon or a gluon.

The anomaly of the day is an anomaly in a certain kind of B meson decay.

A Covarying Coupling Constant theory performs similarly to, but not better than MOND.

Not long ago, we were finally able to find decent sized bones that proteins provided proteomic evidence (rather than DNA evidence which was not available) were able to match to Denisovans, which were found on the coast of the main island of Taiwan, finally

There is weak evidence that the radial acceleration relation, which is implied by Milgrom's toy-model MOND theory of weak field gravity, requires a single parameter correction is correlated with the compactness of the galaxies measured, primarily in dwarf…

Reductionist physicists always like to derive physical constants, rather than than simply measure them.

A hydrogen gas cloud, called Cloud-9, that has been observed in deep space in the radio wave frequency, which cannot be seen in the visible light spectrum provides a way to distinguish between different dark matter hypotheses and while the paper below doe…

A glueball is a strong force bound system without any valence quarks that binds gluons, the carrier bosons of the strong force instead of quarks.

Observations of high energy out space sourced neutrinos from an Earth based neutrino detector further constrain the parameter space of possible sterile neutrinos in a way that the LHC, reactor experiments, and an Antarctica based cosmic ray observatory do…

Every new precision measurement of the Higgs boson mass is golden, and it is increasingly being pinned down to some precision.