Stacy McGaugh On Thin Galaxies

Astrophysicist Stacy McGaugh, at his Triton Station blog, observes that there are far more thin spiral galaxies than expected from cold dark matter halo explanations of galactic rotation curves. MOND does much better in this respect.

This is notable because MOND wasn't designed to produce this data point, and because once again, MOND is predictive while the LambdaCDM model of cosmology is not.

He is mostly highlighting results from a December 2025 paper by Benavides et al., that had escaped my notice in the daily flood of new astronomy papers. Some key illustrations from that paper:

q is a mathematical measurement of how thin a galaxy is relative to its diameter (roughly speaking, thickness divided by diameter). The chart above demonstrates how measurement effects driven by the angle of inclination at which we see galaxies make a world with many thin galaxies look more evenly spread.

This chart illustrates that LambdaCDM simulations dramatically underestimate the proportion of thin galaxies at all but the highest masses (and that many models don't even manage that match to reality at any point).

A final illustration is from one of McGaugh's own papers in 1998 and shows that MOND tends to produce flatter galaxies than Newtonian physics does (even though, unlike Deur's model, MOND is spherically symmetric, rather than relying, in part, on  the shape of a galaxy to demonstrate the dark matter replacing gravitational effect).

Neutrino Oscillations Disfavor Dark Dimensions And Right Handed Neutrinos

Two moderately popular beyond the Standard Model neutrino physics models are strongly disfavored by empirical data.

Right-handed neutrinos are naturally induced by dark extra dimension models and play an essential role in neutrino oscillations. The model parameters can be examined by the long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiments. In this work, we compute the predicted neutrino oscillation spectra within/without extra dimension models and compare them with the experimental data. We find that the neutrino data in the T2K and NOvA experiments are compatible with the standard neutrino oscillation hypothesis. The results set the stringent exclusion limit on the extra dimension model parameters at a high confidence level. The derived constraints on dark dimension right-handed neutrinos are complementary to those results from the collider experiments and cosmological observations.

Ai-Yu Bai, Auttakit Chatrabhuti, Yin-Yuan Huang, Hiroshi Isono, Jian Tang, "Dark Dimension Right-handed Neutrinos Confronted with Long-Baseline Oscillation Experiments" arXiv:2601.00790 (January 2, 2026).

An Alternative To MOND and Dark Matter

This deserves further attention. 

We present a new empirical model for galaxy rotation curves that introduces a velocity correction term omega, derived from observed stellar motion and anchored to Keplerian baselines. Unlike parametric halo models or modified gravity theories, this approach does not alter Newtonian dynamics or invoke dark matter distributions. Instead, it identifies a repeatable kinematic offset that aligns with observed rotation profiles across a wide range of galaxies. Using SPARC data [1], we demonstrate that this model consistently achieves high fidelity fits, often outperforming MOND and CDM halo models in RMSE and R-squared metrics without parametric tuning. The method is reproducible, minimally dependent on mass modeling, and offers a streamlined alternative for characterizing galactic dynamics. While the velocity correction omega lacks a definitive physical interpretation, its empirical success invites further exploration. We position this model as a local kinematic tool rather than a cosmological framework, and we welcome dialogue on its implications for galactic structure and gravitational theory. Appendix B presents RMSE and R2 comparisons showing that this method consistently outperforms MOND and CDM halo models across a representative galaxy sample.

David C. Flynn, Jim Cannaliato, "A New Empirical Fit to Galaxy Rotation Curves" arXiv:2601.00522 (January 2, 2026) (published at 12 Front. Astron. Space Sci. 1680387 (2025)).

Fairies And Fungi

* Fairy rings are a fungal phenomena.

* Fairies are often depicted as chthonic with underground halls, and eating fairy food traps you in their world forever. Fungi are one of the few living things that can survive and thrive underground without light.

* The Santa Claus myth and Christmas tree ornaments are deeply tied to hallucinogenic mushroom use by shamans in places where reindeer roam.

* Fungi are pervasively present in temperate forests which are seen as a natural habitat of fairies and were places feared in medieval times.

* Fairies are associated with glamours and deception, and many fungi, such as ergot, cause hallucinations and a sense of distortion of time..

* Fungal infections can make insects and small plants look and behave weirdly in ways that could cause them to be called fairies.

* The bane of fairies, iron and to a lesser degree salt, are inorganic while fungi are organic.

* Curious children eating mushrooms that cause their death or cause them to act abnormally could be associated with the changling myth.

* Fungi come in many varieties that are hard to distinguish from each other like fungi.

* Fungi have properties that distinguish them from "normal" biological things like plants and animals.

* Could "fairy dust" be spores or yeast?

* Mushrooms are of a scale often associated with fairies.

* There is a forests, fairies, and fungi sticker book anthology.

* Fairies are often depicted as amoral or having fundamentally different motivations than humans, which is a fit to fungi and its effects on mankind.

Signs That What You Are Reading Does Not Describe Reality

Look out for these key words in scientific claims that make it almost certain that what you are reading about don't describe reality, or has been misunderstood by a science journalist:

* Tachyons.

* Traversable wormholes.

* Anything that could make faster than light communication technologies possible (key point: quantum entanglement cannot be used to send faster than light messages).

* String theory.

* Supersymmetry.

* WIMPs (or even claims that WIMPs are well-motivated).

* Models with sterile dark matter of MeV particle mass or more.

* Claims that dark matter distributions in galaxies usually or typically have an NFW distribution.

* Negative mass or mass-energy.

* Claims that antimatter gravitates differently than matter.

* Claims that the Lambda CDM cosmology model is fully consistent with astronomy observations.

* Claims that understanding CP violation in the Standard Model could explain the baryon asymmetry of the universe (i.e. why matter is so much more common than antimatter).

* Tired light.

* Claims that scientists have created black holes on Earth.

* Perpetual motion machines.

* Claims that any widely used vaccine does more harm than good.

* Claims that vaccines cause autism.

* Homeopathy.

* Claims that autism doesn't have a large genetic component.

* Chem trails.

* Claims that human activity has not caused significant global warming.

* Young Earth creationism.

* Claims that a global flood really happened.

* Intelligent design.

* Gender ideology.

* Intelligent extraterrestrial life on Earth.

* Claims that people in pre-modern societies were less violent than modern societies.

* Claims that genocide didn't happen prior to the modern era.

* An Anatolian origin for the Indo-European languages.

* A South Asian origin for the Indo-European languages.

* A Neolithic origin for the Indo-European languages.

* Technologically advanced civilizations prior to the Last Glacial Maximum (ca. 20,000 years ago).

* The Solutrean Hypothesis.

* Claims that modern humans evolved outside Africa (although modern humans did experience admixture with other hominin species in small amounts outside of Africa).

* Claims that hominins as a clade evolved outside of Africa.

* Claims that ancient artisans were "impossibly advanced."

There are other claims that, while not impossible or more or less definitively disproven should be viewed with great skepticism:

* Explanations for phenomena that rely on new, beyond the Standard Model particles or forces (except gravity).

* Sterile neutrino theories.

* Claims that discrepancies between inclusive and exclusive measurements of something point to new physics.

* Any claim motivated by the muon g-2 anomaly (which does not exist).

* Claims of any baryon number violating process, or any lepton number violating process (other than sphalerons).

* Claims of Lorentz symmetry violations.

* Claims of charged leptons have any properties that differ from each other, other than mass (sometimes called "lepton universality violations").

* Claims that someone has seen dark matter annihilation signatures.

* Claims of CP violation or time-symmetry violation that don't involve W boson mediated phenomena.

* Claims of CPT symmetry violation.

A Neolitic Collapse

Around 5000 BCE, the Linear Pottery Culture (LBK) of first European farmers experienced a meltdown. After meany centuries of peace, suddenly war broke out between settlements and there are traces of mass slaughter of whole villages. We know when it happened and what happened to a great extent, but we don't know why peace suddenly collapsed all across the LBK cultural region.

This appears to have been an internal Neolithic era event. It preceded the Bronze and Copper Ages, and preceded Indo-European expansion.

Dark Matter Still Hasn't Been Directly Observed

"Dark matter phenomena" are real, based upon the consensus interpretation of astronomers and astrophysicists looking at astronomy evidence.

Overwhelming evidence shows the existence of "dark matter phenomena" evidenced primarily by the dynamics of galaxies and galaxy clusters, by the gap between all discernible sources of ordinary matter and the amount of matter inferred using a Newtonian approximation of gravity, and by the gap between all discernible sources of ordinary matter and the amount of matter inferred from gravitational lensing of light using a weak field approximation of General Relativity. Cosmic background radiation patterns also support the conclusion that dark matter phenomena are real.

But Stacy McGaugh in his latest blog post at Triton Station, reminds us that there have been no credible and reliable detections of dark matter itself in the Milky Way, even though many hypotheses have been searched for with a variety of means.

Direct detection experiments have come up empty and have probed dark matter particle mass ranges from a bit below 1 GeV to about 1000 GeV. 

Macroscopic dark matter candidates like primordial black holes and MACHOs have been ruled out. 

No missing momentum signals in collider experiments up to the 13 TeV energies of the Large Hadron Collider have revealed any anomalies that are good dark matter candidates produced in these reactions.

Astronomy searches for dark matter annihilation signatures have come up empty and where there have been anomalies have other explanations that don't require new physics or dark matter particles.

The dynamics of dark matter also, generally speaking, rule out heavy dark matter candidates with particle masses in excess of 1 TeV, or for that matter, in excess of a KeV mass.

The lack of direct detections or detections of decay products doesn't in and of itself rule out the dark matter hypothesis. It just tightens the parameter space for dark matter to something that doesn't interact via Standard Model forces and is stable on a time frame of many billions of years of mean lifetime or more.

But, the problem you get when you impose those conditions is that you can't explain why dark matter isn't observed to have the NFW halo distribution that dark matter like that should have. A self-interaction of dark matter with dark matter only (SIDM) could partially remedy that problem, although efforts to model that and fit parameters for that self-interaction have largely been unsuccessful.

Some dark matter models are ruled out by evidence from Big Bang Nucelosynthesis.

Most importantly, you can't explain why dark matter phenomena can be accurately predicted from the distribution of ordinary matter in a system in a very tight correlation if it has no non-gravitational interactions with ordinary matter.

This is why I strongly favor gravity or fifth force explanations for dark matter phenomena. An extremely light bosonic dark matter particle candidate, however, starts to blur the line between a fifth force and a dark matter particle explanation. 

In all other aspects of physics, forces are carried by bosons (i.e. particles with integer intrinsic angular momentums like 0, 1, 2, etc.) that we sometimes simplify to think of as force fields, while the stuff that we think of as matter in a plain English sense of the word, is made up of fermions (i.e. particles with intrinsic angular momentum of 1/2, 3/2, etc.).

DES Reduces S8 Tension

One of the persistent tensions in cosmology measurements, that has attracted less attention from the general public than the Hubble tension, is the value of a parameter called S8 (which measures "clustering amplitude" at a cosmological level) estimated from the cosmic background radiation measurements and the measurement from other means. New data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) weakens that tension.

Cosmology from weak gravitational lensing has been limited by astrophysical uncertainties in baryonic feedback and intrinsic alignments. 

By calibrating these effects using external data, we recover non-linear information, achieving a 2% constraint on the clustering amplitude, S8, resulting in a factor of two improvement on the ΛCDM constraints relative to the fiducial Dark Energy Survey Year 3 model. The posterior, S8 = 0.832+0.013−0.017, shifts by 1.5σ to higher values, in closer agreement with the cosmic microwave background result for the standard six-parameter ΛCDM cosmology. 

Our approach uses a star-forming 'blue' galaxy sample with intrinsic alignment model parameters calibrated by direct spectroscopic measurements, together with a baryonic feedback model informed by observations of X-ray gas fractions and kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect profiles that span a wide range in halo mass and redshift. Our results provide a blueprint for next-generation surveys: leveraging galaxy properties to control intrinsic alignments and external gas probes to calibrate feedback, unlocking a substantial improvement in the precision of weak lensing surveys.

Leah Bigwood, et al., "Confronting cosmic shear astrophysical uncertainties: DES Year 3 revisited" arXiv:2512.04209 (December 3, 2025).

New astronomy observations also strongly constrains multi-field cosmological inflation models. And, another study combining data from multiple collaborations, strongly disfavors cosmological "inflation models preferred by Planck alone, such as Higgs, Starobinsky, and exponential α-attractors, in favor of other models, such as polynomial α-attractors," based upon its new measurements of cosmological parameter n(s) (the primordial power spectrum).

Finally, there were several new preprints today exploring the WIMP dark matter hypothesis, which is irritating because the WIMP dark matter hypothesis has been almost completely ruled out by a variety of independent means.

Volcano Driven Famine Brought Black Plague Bearing Fleas In Grain Shipments To Europe In 1347

Volcanic eruptions in 1345 CE, lead to crop failures from 1345 to 1347 in the Mediterranean. This led Italians to import grain from Mongols near the sea of Azov region (currently between Ukraine and Russia) in 1347, where a black plague infestation was already present, spreading the plague to Europe. The black plague then ran rampant across Europe from 1347 to 1353 killing an immense share of the population of Europe (up to 60% of some towns and villages). 

Several years of famine also probably weakened the immune systems of most Europeans, impairing their ability to fight to black plague bacteria and making its lethality rate greater.

This black plague pandemic actually started in "the arid foothills of the Tien Shan mountains west of Lake Issyk-Kul in modern-day Kyrgyzstan" in 1338, but it took nine more years for it to reach Europe. While the volcano induced famines in Europe sped its spread, arguably its eventual arrival in Europe, sooner or later, was almost inevitable.

Human history is pockmarked with periods of death and destruction on unimaginable scales. Of these calamitous epochs, one stands out: The Black Death. The mid 14th century scourge killed tens of millions of people in Europe, Asia, and Africa and changed the course of history—marking the tail end of the Middle Ages and ushering in the cultural reawakening of the Renaissance by disrupting society, the feudal system, and economies across the continent. 

Researchers have long known the Black Death’s central villain: the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which caused the bubonic plague that swept through towns and villages with a mortality rate of up to 60 percent. Experts also know this microbial agent was spread by fleas, borne on the backs of rodent pests and maybe domestic animals, and passed between humans through the air and bodily fluids. But historians have had a tougher time recreating the sequence of events that initially started the devastating pandemic. 

Now, a pair of scientists have found new clues hidden in tree rings. By looking at these rings in the Spanish Pyrenees—as well as details in historical accounts of the time—they suggest that heightened volcanic activity sometime around 1345 may have sparked a famine, kicking off the sequence of events that eventually led to the Black Death raging through Eurasia from 1347 and 1353. They published their findings today in Communications Earth & Environment. . . . 

Here is the model Bauch and his colleague Ulf Büntgen, a dendrochronologist at Cambridge University, propose. As yet unknown volcanic eruptions ejected huge amounts of ash and gases into the atmosphere around 1345, causing drops in annual temperatures that persisted for several years. The cross sections from living and relic trees that the researchers studied had “blue rings,” denoting abnormally cold and wet summer growth seasons, in 1345, 1346, and 1347. Additional accounts from the time considered by Bauch and Büntgen tell of abnormal cloudiness and dark lunar eclipses, further hints of volcanic activity. This sustained cooling could have caused widespread crop failure across the Mediterranean. 

The resulting food shortages drove merchants in the maritime republics of Venice, Genoa, and Pisa to increase imports of grain from the Mongols living around the sea of Azov in 1347. Along with shipments of grain coursing across established trade routes came plague-infested fleas. Once Y. pestis and the fleas that carried it landed in Europe, the pathogen jumped to rats, mice, and perhaps domesticated animals. Eventually the disease hopped to humans, and people began transmitting it in densely packed population centers. The rest is a dark part of history. 

“For more than a century, these powerful Italian city states had established long-distance trade routes across the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, allowing them to activate a highly efficient system to prevent starvation,” said Bauch. “But ultimately, these would inadvertently lead to a far bigger catastrophe.” 

From a Facebook post by Nautilus Magazine. 

The introduction to the published paper states:

Recent advances in paleogenetic research now demonstrate that the Black Death was caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which is likely to persist in different forms in natural reservoirs, including wildlife rodent populations. Investigations of great gerbil (Rhombomys opimus) populations in Kazakhstan, for instance, have outlined how the bacterium can be transmitted from one mammalian host to another by hematophagous insect vectors, such as fleas. The zoonotic disease, however, only occasionally spills over to domestic mammals and humans, and so far three pandemics have been documented: The Justinianic plague from circa 541 to the second half of the 8th century CE; the second pandemic starting around 1338 CE in central Asia and later outbreaks in the Mediterranean region and Europe until the early 19th century CE; and the third plague pandemic that had its origin in the 1770s in China and is arguably still prevalent in endemic rodent populations in different parts of the world.

A combination of archaeological, historical and ancient genomic data proposes that the causal agent of the second plague pandemic most likely originated from the arid foothills of the Tien Shan mountains west of Lake Issyk-Kul in modern-day Kyrgyzstan. A genetically distinct strain of the bacterium was then transmitted along ancient trade routes and entered Europe via the northern Black Sea region in the early 1340s. While changes in long-distance maritime grain trade have been introduced as a possible explanation for the import of plague-infected fleas to Venice and other Mediterranean harbour towns in 1347 CE, this chain of arguments excludes alternative transmission pathways, such as human-to-human infection or the transport of rodents and goods. Intriguingly, the role climatic changes and associated environmental factors may have played in the onset and establishment of the Black Death remains controversial amongst scholars from the natural and social sciences and the humanities.

Despite an ever-growing understanding of the evolution, origin and transmission of Yersinia pestis during the second plague pandemic, it is still unclear if the bacterium was frequently re-introduced into Europe or if natural reservoirs of the bacterium ever existed there. Recent insights into plague ecology include aspects of prolonged flea survival without human and/or rodent hosts but feeding opportunities on grain dust during long-term food shipments. Empirical evidence from around 1900 CE may therefore be considered as a possible explanation of how Yersinia pestis could have arrived in medieval Italy. While there is so far no convincing argument to pre-date the beginning of the second plague pandemic into the 13th century CE, changes in socio-economic structures, political institutions and trade networks since the second half of the 13th century possibly impacted the course of the second plague pandemic.

Here, we show that interdisciplinary investigations into the entanglements between weather, climate, ecology and society well before the Black Death are essential to understand the exceptional level of spread and virulence that made the first wave of the second plague pandemic so deadly. Based on annually resolved and absolutely dated reconstructions of volcanically forced cooling, transregional famine, and changes in long-distance maritime grain trade from 1345–1347 CE, we argue that the onset of the Black Death most likely resulted from a complex interplay of natural and societal factors and processes. Although this unique spatiotemporal coincidence of many influences seems rare, our findings emphasise the increased likelihood of zoonotic infectious diseases to suddenly emerge and rapidly translate into pandemics in both, a globalised and warmer world with COVID-19 just being the latest warning sign.

A Quick Recap Regarding The Indo-European Languages

 

This post is pretty much entirely old news that I've blogged about previously. But every once and a while it is worth recapping the basics for folks who are new to the discussion (and quite frankly, I just haven't had the time lately to post in more depth about more up to date developments in this field).

The Indo-European Languages

More than 40% of humans alive today speak an Indo-European language as their mother tongue, some 3.4 billion people (and well north of 50% if you count second-language learners). The top ten are:

Spanish ~484 million

English ~390 million

Hindi ~345 million

Portuguese ~250 million

Bengali ~242 million

Russian ~145 million

Punjabi ~120 million

Marathi ~83 million

Urdu ~78 million

German ~76 million

Via Razib Khan

It is also worth noting that the 'Indo" part of "Indo-European", basically, languages derived from Sanskrit (formally known as the Indo-Aryan language family) as it existed ca. 1500 BCE, is a huge part of the total with about 868 million speakers (about 39% of the top ten) among the top ten Indo-European languages, compared to about 1365 million for European languages (including native speakers of versions of those languages spoken mostly in their New World colonies in North America and South America, and in Australia and New Zealand) among the top ten Indo-European languages. There are more Sanskrit derived language speakers in the top ten than there are Latin derived (Romance) language speakers in the top ten.

Where Did The Indo-European Languages Come From?

All Indo-European languages are derived from the Proto-Indo-European language spoken by about 10,000-20,000 people in what is now Ukraine, probably making up several tribes of people with a mixed herder-farmer form of subsistence, around 3000 BCE. 

Speculatively, Proto-Indo-European may have arisen from a fusion of the language of an early herder community in the region and an early farmer community in the reegion.

The Indo-European language expansion had a large demic component (i.e. it involved Indo-Europeans people replacing or demographically swamping existing populations), although the extent that this happened varied considerably, from about 90% replacement in the British Isles ca. 2500-2400 BCE, to less than 15% in parts of Southern India (where Indo-European languages are currently not widely spoken in daily life as a first language). 

Indo-European Languages In South Asia

In India, the Indo-European demic component in places where Dravidian languages are now the predominant native language, is probably the product of a first wave of Indo-European conquest that covered almost all of the Indian subcontinent and led to the extinction of most of the then existing Dravidian language. This conquest was then followed by a Dravidian reconquest of most of the formerly Dravidian linguistic territory by speakers of a sole surviving Dravidian language in a small area that managed to escape language shift at the hands of the Indo-Aryan conquerors. The reconquest kept the invader's proto-Hindu religion (maintained to this day by members of a broad Brahmin caste called a "varna" in South India, who have significant ancestry from those invaders), however, mostly intact but with regional influences. Subsequent waves of Indo-European people migrated to Northern India after this reconquest, but not to Southern India.

This explains why the last date of mass Indo-European admixture is older in Southern India than in Northern India (which is mostly Indo-European speaking), why the Dravidian language family looks so young despite the fact that the most plausible time for it to emerge is in the South Asian Neolithic Revolution ca. 2500 BCE (not all that different from the Proto-Indo-European language, despite the fact that the Indo-European language family that is far more diverse and has far more time depth), why Indo-European ancestry found across all of India but in varying proportions by location and caste, and why Indo-European language speaking Hindus are much more likely to be vegetarians than Dravidian language speaking Hindus (vegetarianism was one aspect of the invader's religion that didn't survive the Dravidian reconquest).

Their expansion is summarized in  broad brush without some of the finer details in the map above, which is generally accurate but subject to revision as new evidence from archaeology and ancient DNA and historical linguistics refines it. 

Indo-European Anatolian Languages.

Probably the most controversial part of the map pertains to how the Anatolian Indo-European languages (which are now extinct) relate to the other Indo-European languages. 

These languages are greatly diverged from other Indo-European languages (and there is not much Steppe ancestry in ancient DNA from Neolithic and Bronze Age Anatolia), which has led some historical linguists to try to come up with contorted theories to explain what seems like a very old date of divergence of the Anatolian languages from the other Indo-European languages, in the face of genetic evidence, ancient historical records from nearby areas, and archaeology, that don't seem to fit this narrative.

For example, some scholars think that the Indo-European languages originated in Anatolia in the Neolithic era and then had a secondary expansion to almost everywhere else sometime after 3000 BCE. This well-intentioned effort to fit the linguistic distinctiveness of the Anatolian languages to the other evidence is wrong.

In my informed but not credentialed opinion, the Indo-European languages originated on the Steppe, and one wave of Indo-European migrants travelled to Anatolia around 2000 BCE (at a time when Indo-Europeans were rapidly expanding in all directions due to a climate driven collapse of civilizations in Europe and India at the time). The Anatolian languages are more distinct from other Indo-European languages. But this is not because the time depth of their relationship is older. 

Instead, it is because unlike most other places that the Indo-European languages expanded to, the local copper age/early Bronze Age civilization in Anatolia has not collapsed to nearly the same extent, so the Anatolian languages spread more through elite dominance than demically, and the Anatolian languages had a stronger substrate influence from the Hattic language spoken in the region before it was conquered by an Indo-European elite in the centuries following 2000 BCE from a couple of modest Indo-European villages, in a process of conquest that is historically attested that ultimately gave rise to a Hittite empire. Most historically attested Indo-European Anatolian languages are known only after the Hittite language fractured after the Hittite Empire collapsed in the regional phenomena known as Bronze Age collapse, ca. 1200 BCE, in a process similar to the fragmentation of the Romance languages after the fall of the Roman Empire. Only two or three of the Anatolian languages (including Hittite) predate this fragmentation.

The Anatolian languages also seem more distinct because the substrate languages for Indo-European languages in Europe were all part of the same Neolithic Paleo-European language family of the first farmers of Europe (who largely replaced early European hunter-gatherers), derived from their common origins in Western Anatolia (before Anatolia experienced a language shift in the Copper Age or early Bronze Age as invaders from the Caucuses and Western Asian highlands conquered its Neolithic civilization).

Some of what looks like shared Indo-European roots in European Indo-European languages is really the product of a shared Paleo-European linguistic substrate that is absent in the Anatolian languages and Tocharian languages (which are the most diverged from other European language causing some linguists to assume that the greater divergence represented greater time depth of the divergence).

The Tocharian language family

Another, less intense controversy in Indo-European historical linguistics is how the extinct Tocharian language family fits into the overall picture.

The Tocharian languages, attested in written form and spoken historically in the Tarim Basin of Central Asia, is the attested Indo-European language family that is probably most conservative with respect to Proto-Indo-European. This is because it experienced far less contact with other languages and had almost no substrate influence as the Tocharians moved into basically unoccupied territory. In the same way and for the same reasons, Icelandic is the most conservative Germanic language, the Spanish of the American Southwest is the most conservative Spanish dialect, and the Appalachian English dialect is closest in pronunciation to Shakespearian English. 

In my own life, I've personally seen that the Korean language dialect of Korean migrants to the U.S. is more conservative than that of Koreans who stayed in Korea. Languages evolve most slowly at the frontiers if they have limited language contract with other languages (something that obviously isn't true of second generation and later Korean language speakers in the U.S., of course).

The Higgs Boson Continues To Behave Like The Standard Model Higgs Boson

Searches for Higgs boson to charm-anticharm quark pairs at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), are still too imprecise to precisely determine if the size of its branching fraction matches the Standard Model expectation. But Higgs boson decays to bottom-antibottom quark pairs, the dominant form of Standard Model Higgs boson decays, has a best fit value that is extremely close to the Standard Model predicted value and an uncertainty of roughly ± 50%.

This study breaks out decay detections by different kinds of Higgs boson production methods, which, aside from serving as an internal consistency check of the robustness of the Standard Model's understanding of the Higgs boson, is of only technical interest.

A search for Standard Model (SM) Higgs bosons produced via vector-boson fusion at the Large Hadron Collider and decaying into a charm quark-antiquark pair (H→cc¯) is presented. The datasets used correspond to integrated luminosities of 37.5 fb^−1 and 51.5 fb^−1 and were collected by the ATLAS detector from proton-proton collisions at s√=13 and 13.6 TeV, respectively. 

The observed (expected) upper limit on the H→cc¯ production cross-section times branching ratio is 41 (28) times the SM prediction at 95% confidence level. Combining this search with the previous H→cc¯ search in associated production with a W or Z boson yields an observed (expected) limit on the Higgs-charm Yukawa coupling modifier of |κc| < 4.7 (3.9). 

Higgs bosons decaying into a bottom quark-antiquark pair (H→bb¯) are measured simultaneously using the 51.5 fb^−1 dataset at s√=13.6 TeV, with an observed signal strength of 0.97+0.57−0.50 relative to the SM expectation. When combined with previous H→bb¯ results at 13 TeV, the observed (expected) significance reaches 3.2 (3.6) standard deviations, providing evidence for H→bb¯ events from vector-boson fusion.

ATLAS Collaboration, "Search for H→cc¯ and measurement of H→bb¯ in vector-boson fusion production with the ATLAS Detector" arXiv:2511.21911 (November 26, 2025).

The latest measurement of the top quark mass by the ATLAS Collaboration at the LHS is on the low end, but not terribly precise.

The top-quark mass is measured to be m(top) = 172.17 ± 0.80(stat) ± 0.81(syst) ± 1.07(recoil) GeV, with a total uncertainty of 1.56 GeV. The third uncertainty arises from changing the dipole parton shower gluon-recoil scheme used in top-quark decays.

Derived Properties In Particle Physics

It is customary to assume more properties of gauge theories than is necessary to produce all of their properties. Some of those assumptions can be derived, including CP invariance.

We revisit the emergence of a Yang-Mills symmetry in theories with massless spin 1 particles from fundamental physical properties of scattering amplitudes. In the standard proofs, some symmetry and reality properties of the coupling constants in three-point amplitudes are assumed. These properties cannot be justified using only three-point amplitudes but we show that they arise as consequences of the consistent factorization of four-particle amplitudes, for particular choices of the particle basis. This applies to self-interactions of massless spin 1 particles and also to their interactions with spin 0 and 1/2 particles. CP invariance is a derived property, not an additional assumption. The situation for gravity interactions is analogous and it is dealt with in the same fashion.

Renato M. Fonseca, Clara Hernandez-Garcia, Javier M. Lizana, Manuel Perez-Victoria, "Gauge theories from scattering amplitudes with minimal assumptions" arXiv:2511.21664 (November 26, 2025).

Two Tully-Fischer Relations Linked

 

The Baryonic Tully - Fisher relation (BTFR) links the baryonic mass of galaxies to their characteristic rotational velocity and has been shown to with remarkable precision across a wide mass range. 

Recent studies, however, indicate that galaxy clusters occupy a parallel but offset relation, raising questions about the universality of the BTFR. 

Here, we demonstrate that the offset between galaxies and clusters arises naturally from cosmic time evolution. Using the evolving BTFR derived from the Nexus Paradigm of quantum gravity, we show that the normalization of the relation evolves as an exponential function of cosmic time, while the slope remains fixed at ∼4. This provides a simple and predictive framework in which both galaxies and clusters obey the same universal scaling law, with their apparent offset reflecting their different formation epochs. Our results unify mass-velocity scaling across five orders of magnitude in baryonic mass, offering new insights into cosmic structure formation.

Stuart Marongwe, Stuart Kauffman, "The Evolving Baryonic Tully Fisher Relation: A Universal Law from Galaxies to Galactic Clusters" arXiv:2511.20188 (November 25, 2025).

There is a tight link between the amount of ordinary matter in a galaxy and its rotation speed over many orders of magnitude. This empirical relationship arises naturally from the phenomenological gravity modification known as MOND, without dark matter.

The same relationship holds true for galaxy clusters, but it is shifted from the relationship for galaxies.

The authors propose a theory that would unify both of these relationships. It works, but it isn't terribly convincing but there are a multitude of ways that galaxies and galaxy clusters differ which could give rise to the shift in the relationship that is observed.

Closely related issues are discussed at the latest post at Triton Station.

JUNO Hype And Reality

A new neutrino physics experiment published a preprint with new measurements of neutrino oscillation constants. The new equipment works to high precision and will help fine tune the exact values of some the least precisely known experimentally measured parameters in the Standard Model of Particle Physics. 

This is interesting to people who follow particle physics closely. It is also scientifically important. But honestly, it isn't that interesting to the average person with only a general interest in science.

But, Rory Harris at Live Science in a fit a yellow journalism in the science world, writes a story containing all sorts of nonsense about JUNO revealing beyond the Standard Model physics, as well as the usual, misleading blather about CP violation experimentation answering questions about the baryon asymmetry of the universe (which this experiment does not do).

How Long Do Animals Live?

 

From Quarks To Chemistry

Protons, neutrons, and hundreds of other much less stable hadrons  (i.e. systems of quarks and/or gluons bound by the strong force) are understood quite well with the Standard Model of Particle Physics, although there are challenges in understanding scalar mesons, axial vector mesons, and hadrons with four or more quarks, as well as in distinguishing true hadrons with four or more quarks from "hadron molecules", and predicting the full spectrum of hadrons from first principles.

Protons and neutrons in atomic nuclei are not bound together primarily by the strong force itself. Instead, the nuclear binding force between protons and neutrons in an atomic nucleus is the sum of the forces arising from the exchange of several kinds of light mesons (primarily pions but also other light mesons including kaons).

We are not quite there in terms of using Standard Model physics to explain the physics and chemistry of atomic nuclei, although we are getting closer to achieving this vertical integration of subatomic and atomic scale phenomena, and we making great progress on this front. Part of the hold up is the challenge of explaining "parton distribution functions" (PDFs), a property of hadrons that, in principle, can be worked out from first principles with Standard Model physics. But until the past few years, PDFs have actually been determined almost entirely from brute force raw data collection and organization from particle accelerator data.

We also mostly understand the way electrons interact with atomic nuclei, which is almost entirely an electromagnetic quantum electrodynamics (QED) phenomena.

The next layer above understanding atoms, is chemistry, which pertains mostly to how atoms interact with each other, much of which ultimately flow from the physics of atomic nuceli.

We extend the QCD Parton Model analysis by employing a factorized nuclear structure model that explicitly accounts for both individual nucleons and correlated nucleon pairs. This novel framework establishes a paradigm that directly links the nuclear physics description of matter (in terms of protons and neutrons) to the particle physics schema (in terms of quarks and gluons). 

Our analysis of high-energy data from lepton Deep-Inelastic Scattering, Drell-Yan, and W/Z production simultaneously extracts the universal effective distribution of quarks and gluons inside correlated nucleon pairs, and their nucleus-specific fractions. 

The successful extraction of these universal distributions marks a significant advance in our understanding of nuclear structure, as it directly connects nucleon-level and parton-level quantities.

Fredrick Olness, "Bridging the Gap: Connecting Atomic Nuclei to Their Quantum Foundations" arXiv:2511.15659 (November 19) ("Talk presented at the 32nd International Workshop on Deep Inelastic Scattering and Related Subjects (DIS 2025), Capetown, South Africa, 24-28 March 2025. To appear in the proceedings").

MOND From Loop Quantum Gravity

Another "Fundamond" (i.e. fundamental theory to explain MOND phenomenology) proposal tweaked to incorporate quantum gravity considerations. Spin connection foams are a subset of the loop quantum gravity program that seeks to quantize space-time.

Building upon previous work that derived an alternative to (galactic) dark matter in the form of Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND), with a specific theoretical interpolating function, from the motion of a non-relativistic test particle in the gravitational field of a point mass immersed in the non-relativistic static limit of the spin connection foam -- which represents the quantum analogue of Minkowski spacetime within precanonical quantum gravity -- we now show the consequences of using higher moments (third and fourth) of the corresponding geodesic equation with a random spin connection term. 

These higher moments lead to more general quantum modifications of the Newtonian potential (qMOND potentials expressed in terms of Gauss and Appell hypergeometric functions), more general (steeper) MOND interpolating functions, and a new modification of MOND at low accelerations (mMOND) that features an almost-flat asymptotic rotation curve ∝r−^1/18, which is expected to operate at approximately the same galactic scales as MOND.

M.E. Pietrzyk, V.A. Kholodnyi, I.V. Kanattšikov, J. Kozicki, "Modifications of Newtonian dynamics from higher moments of quantum spin connection in precanonical quantum gravity" arXiv:2511.15025 (November 18, 2025) ("To appear in the Special Issue "My Favourite Dark Matter Model'' of MPLA").

Inflation Without Inflaton

I'm agnostic but skeptical about cosmological inflation. This preprint (which is part of a series of articles) is a middle ground between conventional cosmological inflation theory and a true no inflation theory.

Rather than a new substance/particle, it relies upon the quantum nature of space-time itself for its conclusions.

We present a complete computation of the scalar power spectrum in the inflation without inflaton (IWI) framework, where the inflationary expansion is driven solely by a de~Sitter (dS) background and scalar fluctuations arise as second-order effects sourced by tensor perturbations. By explicitly deriving and numerically integrating the full second-order kernel of the Einstein equations, we obtain a scale-invariant scalar spectrum without invoking a fundamental scalar field. 

In this framework, the amplitude of the scalar fluctuations is directly linked to the scale of inflation. More precisely, we show that matching the observed level of scalar fluctuations, Δ2ϕ(k∗) ≈ 10^−9 at Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) scales, fixes the inflationary energy scale H(inf) as a function of the number of observed e-folds N(obs). 

For N(obs) ≃ 30 − 60, we find Hinf≃5×10^13 GeV − 2 × 10^10 GeV, corresponding to a tensor-to-scalar ratio r≃ 0.01 − 5 × 10^−9. In particular, requiring consistency with instantaneous reheating, we predict a number of e-folds of order~(50) and an inflationary scale H(inf) ≃ 10^11GeV. We also incorporate in our framework the quantum break-time of the dS state and show that it imposes an upper bound on the number of particle species. Specifically, using laboratory constraints on the number of species limits the duration of inflation to N(obs) ≲ 126 e-folds. 

These results establish the IWI scenario as a predictive and falsifiable alternative to standard inflaton-driven models, linking the observed amplitude of primordial fluctuations directly to the quantum nature and finite lifetime of dS space.

Marisol Traforetti, et al., "Inflation without an Inflaton II: observational predictions" arXiv:2511.11808 (November 14, 2025).

C.N. Yang Dies At Age 103

Theoretical physicist C.N. Yang has died at the age of 103 years. 

He is the Yang in Yang-Mills theory, which he and his collaborators devised in 1953, which is a generic quantum field theory that is used by scientists to study amplitudes (i.e. vector probabilities) that are foundational in all Standard Model processes and most quantum gravity theories.

He also won a Nobel prize in 1957 for his work on CP violation.

The Case Against The External Field Effect And A Relativistic MOND Theory

A new paper provides a possible explanation for observational evidence of a MOND-like external field effect, without definitively ruling it out. I made a post about the paper that is being re-examined exactly five years ago today.

We examine the claimed observations of a gravitational external field effect (EFE) reported in Chae et al. 

We show that observations suggestive of the EFE can be interpreted without violating Einstein's equivalence principle, namely from known correlations between morphology, environment and dynamics of galaxies. 

While Chae et al's analysis provides a valuable attempt at a clear test of Modified Newtonian Dynamics, an evidently important topic, a re-analysis of the observational data does not permit us to confidently assess the presence of an EFE or to distinguish this interpretation from that proposed in this article.

Corey Sargent, William Clark, Antonia Seifert, Alicia Mand, Emerson Rogers, Adam Lane, Alexandre Deur, Balša Terzić, "On the Evidence for Violation of the Equivalence Principle in Disk Galaxies" arXiv:2511.03839 (November 5, 2025) (published in 8 Particles 65 (2025)).

Another promising MOND related preprint that uses entropy and temperature (which is associated intimately with entropy) to devise a relativistic gravitational theory that reproduced MOND phenomenology was also released today:

We derive a relativistic extension of Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) within the framework of entropic gravity by introducing temperature-dependent corrections to the equipartition law on a holographic screen. 

Starting from a Debye-like modification of the surface degrees of freedom and employing the Unruh relation between acceleration and temperature, we obtain modified Einstein equations in which the geometric sector acquires explicit thermal corrections. Solving these equations for a static, spherically symmetric spacetime in the weak-field, low-temperature regime yields a corrected metric that smoothly approaches Minkowski space at large radii and naturally contains a characteristic acceleration scale.

In the very-low-acceleration regime, the model reproduces MOND-like deviations from Newtonian dynamics while providing a relativistic underpinning for that phenomenology. We confront the theory with rotation-curve data for NGC~3198 and perform a Bayesian parameter inference, comparing our relativistic MOND (RMOND) model with both a baryons-only Newtonian model and a dark-matter halo model. We find that RMOND and the dark-matter model both fit the data significantly better than the baryons-only Newtonian prediction, and that RMOND provides particularly improved agreement at r≳20kpc. These results suggest that temperature-corrected entropic gravity provides a viable relativistic framework for MOND phenomenology, motivating further observational tests, including gravitational lensing and extended galaxy samples.

A. Rostami, K. Rezazadeh, M. Rostampour, "Relativistic MOND Theory from Modified Entropic Gravity" arXiv:2511.05632 (November 7, 2025).