News and Links Digest (publ. 2024-12-13)

UAF forces gender-neutral dorms and bathrooms

Alaska’s UAF Fairbanks reports spike in campus rapes

Biden clemency for Chinese spies and child porn collector

Biden clemency spree began secretly last month with Chinese nationals in espionage, child porn cases | Just The News

Study shows no correlation between functional and genetic diversity in plants

Ecosystems: New study questions common assumption about biodiversity

Evolutionary assumptions would tie together the development of a plant's function with its genetic history. But the expected correlation appears to be lacking.

Hubble tension aggravated by agreement between Hubble and JWST measurements

Universe expansion study confirms challenge to cosmic theory | ScienceDaily

The "Hubble tension" is a discrepancy between Hubble measurements and the Standard Model of cosmological evolution. Advocates hoped that the discrepancy was due to errors in Hubble measurements, but JWST is giving the same results.

Biden DoJ spied on House members and staffers

IG finds Justice Department spied on Patel and other congressional staffer without telling courts | Just The News

This sort of thing is a "Watergate Scandal", unless Democrats are doing it.

AI model applied to plant genetics

Breakthrough AI model can translate the language of plant life | ScienceDaily

Understanding plant genetics continues to challenge our greatest minds — as well as our artificial neural networks.

"While RNA sequences may appear random to the human eye, our AI model has learned to decode the hidden patterns within them," says Dr Haopeng Yu, the postdoc researcher in Professor Yiliang Ding's group at the John Innes Centre.

Superflares in sun-like stars more frequent than expected

Superflares once per century | ScienceDaily

I want to be careful not to read too much into this research. But it might be relevant to the Creationist assertion that our sun is specially designed for us, and not just another common star. Researchers were surprised at how often sun-like stars have superflares.