Some pretty amazing clips here. Analyst does a good job at ruling out mundane explanations.

https://www.facebook.com/reel/27920019511015884

PAPER: https://journals.aps.org/pra/abstract/10.1103/kmmy-3dy3

SABINE HOSSENFELDER
https://youtu.be/SMXq68UeeXU

VIDEO INTRO: For a decade or so, I've complained that physicists seem content with quantum mechanics as it is. They don't try to fix its problems. Rather, they tell themselves and everyone dumb enough to believe it that we must accept the quantum weirdness. By now, they've glorified the strangeness of quantum mechanics so much, it's become basically impossible for them to move beyond it. If something makes no sense, don't fix it. Give it a mysterious name and start a pop cast.

And yet today, I have a team of physicists who've done exactly that. They've looked for the origin of quantum physics and found at least a possible one. That's intriguing because physicists said it's impossible. Let's have a look.

One of the biggest mysteries on the foundations of physics is one you might never have thought about, causality. We're so used to it, we never even think about it. Flip a switch and the light goes on. Cause and effect, simple enough, unless you have children, in which case the effect just happens and the cause denies involvement. But where does causal order come from? Why is the world so neat and orderly? The authors of the new paper say, "Actually, it isn't. Causality doesn't fundamentally exist any more than say a liquid does. A liquid is fundamentally made of particles. Yet the particles themselves aren't liquid. That just doesn't make any sense. The liquidness is an emergent behavior for a large collection of particles."

The authors of the new paper say causality is like that. It doesn't exist on the fundamental level. It's an emergent behavior that we observe for many quantum particles. The reason I find this interesting is not just that it could explain the origin of causality. It's also that causality is one of the reasons why it's so difficult to combine quantum physics with gravity. Physicists have been looking for such a combination, a theory of quantum gravity, for almost a century...

https://youtu.be/SMXq68UeeXU

This is apparently why the Indiana Fever coach is not much liked by the team's own fans. Nada from her after the incident. Putatively, she has political grudges against her own players.
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LINDA COHN
https://youtu.be/8odm_LxtChk

VIDEO EXCERPTS: The latest blatant example came against Minnesota when Sophie Cunningham, of course, was a guard for the Indiana Fever. She took a hard elbow to the face from forward Nia Coffey. I couldn't believe that her head was still attached.

So, you would have thought, "Oh, there's a foul called on the Minnesota player Coffey." Now, there was a foul called, but remarkably, it was called on Sophie Cunningham...

[...] And then they went to video review, and I thought I was watching the game. They went to video review, the officials, and I thought, "Oh, they'll straighten this out. It's obviously a misunderstanding." You know, they want to get the call right. That's why we have video. They stood over that video longer than any human should have.

And guess what? Did they reverse the call? Did they make it a non-call? Did they give Coffee the call, meaning that she was the guilty party? No. They stayed with their first decision. They said, "No, Sophie Cunningham deserved the foul." And Sophie's like looking up and like, "Are you kidding me?"

My issue was, unless I missed it, I didn't see Sophie Cunningham's head coach, Stephanie White, come to her aid, like all head coaches should when number one, their player gets elbowed in the face; and number two, when they do not get the call that they deserved, which would have helped the team. Now, Indiana ends up losing to Minnesota. I think it was by eight points, but this is ridiculous.

Were the officials trying to send a message to Sophie Cunningham? I know she's the most polarizing player in the league, but be better. How many times do we have to say this? They are the worst officiating I've ever seen in any professional sport. And they do not do anything to change my mind.

[...] What these coaches forget to to point out and the reason why Sophie Cunningham has to say this and why there are protests of support and protests against Sophie. ... They forget to mention that there are 23 states plus the District of Columbia that allow biological men to compete in women's sports and be in locker rooms. Transgender girls, who are also biological men, can do this in 23 states.

But when you listen to these WNBA coaches, and there were a couple that spoke out, you would think this doesn't happen. You would think this was a made-up narrative.

That's why 80% of the country believes in what Sophie Cunningham is saying and stating. And isn't she allowed to say it? I said that in the last show. When is that a crime against humanity? You have this free speech. You can speak up. You don't have to agree with it, and you can create and debate it. But you do not get to physically bully the person...

WNBA continues to be its own worst enemy ... https://youtu.be/8odm_LxtChk

Yep...they're everywhere alright.

https://www.facebook.com/reel/1335830388267308

Same thing three years ago. Get accustomed to it.
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Ghostly Nazi Germany fleet emerges from Danube due to Europe's heatwave
https://www.forcesnews.com/heritage/nava...g-heatwave

INTRO: The skeletal, rusty and sand-covered remains of several Nazi warship wrecks, laden with tonnes of unexploded ammunition and weapons, have resurfaced in the Danube River near the Serbian port town of Prahovo.

This phenomenon is occurring because the Danube is experiencing its lowest water levels in more than 50 years in certain areas of Serbia, largely due to a heatwave affecting Europe – the highest temperature recorded in Prahovo so far this summer has reached 40.0°C.

The heatwave has triggered a drought, disrupting shipping and energy production due to reduced water levels and has led to the discovery of historical artifacts, such as Nazi warships and what historians believe to be the remains of an ancient mammoth in Bulgaria.

About 200 Kriegsmarine, Nazi Germany's naval branch of the Wehrmacht, ships are resting on the Danube's riverbed because, in September 1944, Rear Admiral Paul-Willy Zieb ordered their deliberate sinking in a zigzag pattern to slow down the advancing Soviet Red Army.

The Danube, Europe's second-longest river, flows through four capital cities, links 10 countries and is considered by the European Commission as the "single most important non-oceanic body of water in Europe" and a "future central axis for the European Union".

However, the Nazi warships, which appear whenever the water levels of the Danube go down this low, have nearly halved the navigable width of the Prahovo channel – a narrow shipping route on the river... (MORE - details)

https://youtu.be/EgsRyXDuI38

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1138896

EXCERPTS: The most important people in a clinical trial may be the ones who never join it. Every "no" in a clinical trial is usually treated as the end of a conversation, but a new MUSC study suggests it might be the beginning of an important one.

While recruiting for a parent study, researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) were surprised to discover that patients with college experience were three times more likely to decline participation in an overdose prevention research study than those without a high school diploma. This finding prompted a closer look at who declines to participate in clinical trials.

[...] Rather than treating those 46 refusals as lost opportunities, the researchers saw the chance to learn more about them and why they said no. “The people who declined to participate are a really interesting group that we don’t ask enough questions about,” said McClure. She and her team were driven by one big question: “What are the reasons why people would decline to participate?”

The findings challenged several assumptions about who is most likely to participate in research. Those with any college experience were three times more likely to decline than those without a high school diploma. People without health insurance were also three times more likely to say no than those with insurance. Lastly, the younger the patient, the greater the likelihood of their opting out.

“That’s not what we expected to find,” said McClure. Heretofore, researchers could only speculate about the reasons behind these patterns. Possible explanations have included stigma, misconceptions about research participation or differing attitudes toward treatment among younger adults.

However, through patient self-reporting, researchers learned that the most common reasons for declining participation were wanting to leave the ED as quickly as possible, feeling unwell, disinterest in research and feeling that the intervention wouldn’t be helpful. Notably, many people who declined the study still wanted help. While 56.5% were not in treatment for their substance use, nearly two-thirds said they wanted treatment services. This finding indicates that declining research is not the same as declining care.

“This suggests to me that it’s not something about the peer support itself that is not appealing to them. It’s about being in a research study,” said McClure. Timing and the ED setting both could be additional contributing factors in these cases.

“The desire is there,” explained McClure. “They want peer support, but maybe just not right now.”

They also explored the potential that researchers don’t present opportunities in ways that resonate with participants.

“We expect a lot from people, and research studies can be highly burdensome for participants,” explained McClure. “I see this as a call to action for the research community to improve our methods and improve the ways in which we engage people in research.”

They determined that promising strategies include incorporating technology in a way that makes participation less taxing, like offering telehealth visits and delivering medication by mail. The researchers also cited the importance of connecting with participants when they are ready.... (MORE - missing details, no ads)

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1138139

INTRO: Living amongst large predatory carnivores could actually make you safer. A study publishing in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on August 5 found that pumas—wild cats also known as mountain lions, cougars, or panthers—change deer behavior, leading to fewer collisions with cars on roadways. In areas where puma occupancy is high, the authors report a significant reduction in the total expected number of collisions over a 5-year period.

“We found that large carnivores can make roadways safer through their effects on prey behavior and space use,” says lead author Justin Suraci of Conservation Science Partners in Truckee, California.

“Deer alter their use of both space and time where pumas are present, overlapping less with roads and reducing activity at night, when some of the most dangerous collisions occur," says Suraci. "Increased road safety thus represents an ecosystem service that large predators like pumas can provide to human communities."

The researchers were interested in quantifying these ecosystem services. While it has been suggested that predators of deer and other ungulates might cut down on car accidents, those dynamics had not been clearly shown or quantified in places where large carnivore populations are well established. Suraci and his colleagues studied a large camera trap dataset and spatial data on collisions between vehicles and wildlife to explore pumas’ effects on their prey’s behavior and the implications for human drivers across the Olympic Peninsula of Washington, USA.

“It’s important to remember that large carnivores, like many wildlife species, can only persist if they’re able to share landscapes with people, which in many cases may require us to change our behaviors and attitudes to make coexistence possible,” Suraci says.

The researchers found that, where pumas are present, deer are more active during the day. They were also 15% less likely to be in areas with lots of roads, choosing instead to spend more time in remote habitat areas.

As a result of those changes in deer activity, the researchers calculated a 67% reduction in the likelihood of a deer-vehicle collision. They also estimated a 76% reduction in the expected number of collisions between vehicles and deer over 5 years. Tracking collar data showed an increase in car accidents with deer during the day instead of at night, when those accidents tend to have worse outcomes.

“Deer try to avoid risk from pumas and, in doing so, spend less time near roads and are involved in fewer collisions,” says Suraci. “Carnivores may well be providing a similar road safety service elsewhere around the globe where populations have persisted and this valuable ecosystem service has just gone unnoticed to date.”

By shedding light on these dynamics, the researchers hope that more people may begin to realize the benefits of living among large carnivores. “This may be especially true for the eastern US and Canada, where pumas are slowly, naturally recolonizing, and there are ongoing discussions about a potential reintroduction program,” says Mark Elbroch of Panthera in New York City. (MORE - no ads)

http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-57049-5

PRESS RELEASE: A research team led by Professor Hitoshi Yamamoto of Rissho University analyzed five years of longitudinal panel survey data collected between 2020 and 2024 and examined how vaccine-related conspiracy beliefs were associated with media skepticism during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study's results appeared in Scientific Reports on August 8, 2026.

Researchers analyzed annual survey data collected from the same participants over five consecutive years to examine how media use, media skepticism, and subjective media literacy were related to later vaccine conspiracy beliefs.

The analyses suggested that vaccine conspiracy beliefs may involve at least two distinct aspects. One reflects distrust of institutions, including beliefs that governments or pharmaceutical companies conceal information. The other involves highly implausible claims, such as the belief that vaccines contain microchips. These two aspects differed in both their prevalence and the factors associated with them.

In particular, conspiracy beliefs rooted in distrust of institutions were more strongly associated with persistent skepticism toward mainstream media and with increasing skepticism over the course of the pandemic.

By contrast, only a relatively small minority of respondents endorsed highly implausible conspiracy beliefs, such as claims that vaccines contain microchips. The researchers note that these extreme claims may nevertheless appear more prominent in online environments, including social media.

The study is also notable because it examined conspiracy beliefs in Japan, where the media environment is generally considered less politically polarized than in many Western countries. The findings suggest that conspiracy-related beliefs can emerge even in informational environments characterized by relatively broad social consensus.

Professor Yamamoto commented:

“When people think about conspiracy beliefs, attention often focuses on highly extreme claims. However, our findings suggest that more common forms of conspiracy-related thinking are associated with persistent distrust of social institutions and the mainstream media. Addressing misinformation may therefore require not only correcting factual inaccuracies, but also understanding how distrust develops and persists within contemporary information environments.”