Non-Muslim officers and staff at West Midlands Police are being encouraged to fast during Ramadan to show "solidarity" with their Muslim colleagues.
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In the event of a nuclear holocaust, the only life remaining on Earth may be cockroaches, Keith Richards and physicists arguing about philosophical interpretations of quantum mechanics. One especially rich source of arguments is a deterministic alternative to the standard Copenhagen interpretation that dates back to the American (and later British, after Princeton University fired him for alleged communist sympathies) theoretical physicist David Bohm. According to Bohm, the position of a quantum particle is well defined everywhere and guided by a “pilot wave” which, alas, cannot be measured directly.
Despite these philosophical differences, Bohmian mechanics makes the same predictions as the Copenhagen interpretation. Except maybe it doesn’t. Occasionally, a bright theorist hypothesizes that, under very specific circumstances, one could distinguish them. Very occasionally, a bright experimentalist conducts an experiment that claims to actually do so.
This is what happened last year when Jan Klärs and colleagues at the University of Twente in the Netherlands sent photons from a laser down one of two coupled waveguides towards a potential step. When the photons reached the step, they could pass through it by quantum tunnelling. They could also pass into the other waveguide. The researchers interpreted the distance the photons travelled through the barrier before tunnelling into the other waveguide as a measurement of their speed.
The key result was that, when the wave functions on both sides of the barrier were the same, the photons still tunnelled at, ahem, light speed – matching the Copenhagen notion that tunnelling occurred equally in both directions. However, the Twente team calculated that Bohmian mechanics predicted that photons inside the step – where the guiding equation didn’t have a real-valued frequency – would be at rest and get stuck. Interferometric measurements showed that wasn’t happening.
Game, set and match to Copenhagen? Er, no. Proponents of Bohmian mechanics immediately disputed the team’s definition of velocity. “It’s just an operational definition,” says Aurélien Drezet of the CNRS University of Grenoble-Alps in France. “It has the units of velocity…but that doesn’t mean that Bohmian mechanics can interpret the result.”
In a “Matters Arising” article in Nature, Drezet and two colleagues at the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa now add an experimental qualm. The fact that the Twente team was able to produce an image shows that radiation must be leaking out of the cavity, Drezet claims: “If you go to higher approximations and include cavity losses, you explain the experiment completely using Bohmian mechanics,” he says.
Klärs, who is preparing a formal response, is unconvinced. On the first point, he sees no reason “why the same speed measurement, which correctly captures the Bohmian velocity in the propagating regime, should cease to be a speed measurement in the evanescent regime”. On the second, he says his group did not ignore radiative leakage from the cavity: they measured it and found it “does not have a significant impact on the scattering physics we investigate or on the interpretation of our results”.
This could go on for some time – regardless of how many seconds it is to midnight.
The post Experiment that may or may not disprove Bohmian mechanics continues to spark debate appeared first on Physics World.
China has “official” churches that are not harassed because they are heavily controlled. Similarly in America, a state religion has arisen around the Trump Administration based on an mixture of Dominionism, Resconstructionism, and New Apostolic Reformation. Pressure is mounting against outliers who hold traditional views of Christianity, especially those who study Bible prophesy.
Christians in the underground church China and in America share a common view that Technocracy is morphing into the “beast system” that is seen in Revelation chapter 13. This is likely the real bone of contention in the Technocrat mind.
It should be noted that China also considers Falun Gong and the Uyghur Muslims to be “enemies of the state.” Both are critical of Chinese Technocracy. ⁃ Patrick Wood, Editor.
When the power cut out and his signal dropped, TJ knew something was wrong.
Seconds later, the banging started on his front door. Terrified, he stood as still as possible with his wife and three-year-old daughter, hoping they wouldn’t be noticed.
But the Chinese police officers broke down the door, shoved his wife and child into a separate room and began to question TJ.
“They grabbed my clothes and grabbed my hands so I couldn’t move. I could hear my daughter crying so much in the room next door but I couldn’t go to her, I couldn’t hug my wife,” he told The Telegraph.
TJ knew what his family’s crime was: being Christian and worshipping a God that was not Xi Jinping. In China, following a church that is not state-controlled is punishable.
The Chinese leader is intensifying Beijing’s crackdown on Christians amid a wider purge of top officials, showing signs of an increasingly paranoid leader.
The country officially recognizes five religions, including Protestantism and Catholicism, but this only extends to churches that are fully state-controlled, where the congregation is expected to sing patriotic songs before every service and affix Mr Xi’s portrait above the pulpit.
Many Christians such as TJ, who withheld his full name for security reasons, and his wife have chosen to join unofficial churches – or underground churches – where they can preach the gospel away from the government’s oversight.
But attending these places of worship carries its own risks – not least because they are seen as traitors.
TJ last saw his wife when she was taken to a police station along with their phones, some books and artwork, and she has yet to be released. He still doesn’t understand why he was not taken too.
Under Mr Xi’s iron-tight grip, China has expanded its nationwide suppression of Christians during the last decade, arresting more than 10,000 people, according to Bob Fu, the founder of ChinaAid, a charity for victims of persecution in the country.
In the most recent crackdown, armed police stormed the Early Rain Covenant, an influential underground church, and detained more than 30 members last month.
Mr Xi’s ruthless campaign against these underground churches aims to ensure the survival of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and remove any threat to his power.
Mr Fu said: “It’s the emperor playing God. [Mr Xi] wants to be exclusive, he doesn’t want to have anything treated or worshipped more superior than him.”
TJ is one of six Chinese Christians who spoke to The Telegraph who have either been directly targeted by the CCP or have close relatives that are incarcerated.
They described police officers showing up at their homes unannounced in the middle of the night. Friends being rounded up and questioned by authorities, sometimes for weeks on end. Loved ones being convicted on trumped-up charges such as “using superstition to undermine the law” and detained indefinitely in crammed, dirty cells. And lawyers were targeted and suspended from practicing law for defending Christians.
Jun Yang, a pastor with Zion Church, one of the largest underground churches in China, knows all too well about the risk of living as a Christian in China.
Nearly 30 members of his church, including Qu Qiuyu, his wife, and Ezra Jin Mingri, the church’s leader, were detained in October last year during one of the largest raids against Christians in recent years.
Mr Jin was released in early July, but many of those detained remain in prison.
Founded in 2007, Zion Church used to operate in a converted nightclub in Beijing but was forced to move to a decentralised, hybrid format 10 years later after the mass arrests of Christians across the underground church network and restrictions during the Covid-19 pandemic forced many of the church’s sessions online.
The church’s membership has grown from 1,500 in 2018 to around 5,000 followers now, since the church adopted the hybrid format.
Mr Yang and other Zion Church members who spoke to The Telegraph said the arrests in October were not a complete surprise. Police had been harassing church members for months before the arrests and had been coming up with incriminating information about the church leaders.
In Mr Yang’s case, they were trying to pin corruption charges on him.
“The police reached out to church followers, even took them back to the police station for questioning. They asked them about donations to the church, whether such donations went into my pocket to buy apartments, or if I had misused them in any way,” he said.
“They were trying to look for excuses to see if they could set a trap for me,” he added.
Mr Yang was visiting South Korea when they raided his family home. Officers arrested his wife and hauled her away in front of their two young children.
Gao Yingjia, another pastor from Zion Church, was also targeted in the October 2025 raids, using similar tactics.
His wife, Geng Pengpeng, told The Telegraph that they had been awoken at 1.30am by loud knocks on the door. The police stormed in, handcuffed her husband and took him away.
“We both knew something like this might happen,” said Ms Geng. “All of our rental [church] locations were shut down and sometimes they would take someone to the detention centre for a week or 15 days.”
Neither Ms Geng nor Mr Yang has spoken to their spouses since they were detained.
For Mr Yang, while he counts himself lucky in some ways, he would do anything to go back in time. “If there was the chance, I would rather be the one arrested than my wife,” he said.
But as much as he wants to see his wife and children, he knows he may never get the chance to return to China.
“I am on the wanted list of religious practitioners so if I return to China I would be arrested,” said Mr Yang.
While Christians have long been treated as outsiders in China, when Mr Xi came to power in 2012, he piled on policies to further assimilate Christians and other religious groups in the country.
In 2015, he launched a “Sinicisation” campaign, which forced all religious and ethnic groups to assimilate and prioritise loyalty to the CCP over individual religious beliefs.
The same Sinicisation policy has been used to imprison and torture Uyghur Muslims in what has been characterised by many human rights organisations as genocide.
In 2018, Beijing rolled out a five-year plan to target Christians, which included censoring sermons, controlling church donations, supervising Bible translations and including “Xi Jinping Thought” in the curriculum of seminary schools.
They also systematically closed underground churches and demolished houses of worship as part of the campaign against worshippers outside the state’s control.
Those who agreed joined China’s two official churches – the Catholic Patriotic Association and the Protestant Three Self Patriotic Movement – while the rest remained part of the underground church network.
Today, there are an estimated 44 million members of the state-sanctioned church and around 115 million unregistered Christians, which are expected to double by 2030.
“My dad was approached many times about the [Three Self churches], and he said no, just like many others because they’re fake churches, to put it bluntly,” said Gao Pu, the son of Gao Quanfu, the incarcerated founder of the Light of Zion Church (different from Zion Church), and Pang Yu.
Experts note that Mr Xi’s Sinicisation campaign and the registered churches aim to remove any threat to the Communist Party’s stronghold over the country.
“On paper, the CCP is still an atheist entity so there’s an element where they fear what they cannot control and don’t understand – or don’t want to understand,” explained Mr Gao.
“Anybody that’s possibly out of their control, they tend to crack down on them very, very fast. They learnt the lessons from the past,” he said, referring to the 1989 student uprisings that were met with violent responses by police at Tiananmen Square.
Under the Sinicisation policy, Chinese police have arrested Christians and isolated them in detention.
Many of those arrested, including Mr Yang and Ms Geng’s spouses, were initially charged with the “illegal use of information networks”, a law that broadly covers any communication connected to “illegal or criminal acts”.
Typically, the charge carries a maximum sentence of three years, but is often combined with additional charges that can carry up to life imprisonment.
Authorities have also accused Christians of “using superstition to undermine the law”, for which the sentence can range from three years to an “indefinite imprisonment”.
However, in some of the cases described to The Telegraph, including those of Ms Geng’s husband and Mr Gao’s parents, authorities adapted the initial charges to fraud instead.
“They change to fraud because it’s much easier for them to slap a number on there and give a sentence, which is actually very heavy,” said Mr Gao.
He told The Telegraph that he did not know how long his parents would be in prison. While they could face more than 10 years, he hopes, given their age – both are in their late 60s – they will be released after only three years.
For Mr Yang’s wife, the charge was updated to illegally operating a business, which carries a longer sentence. However, Mr Yang has no idea how long the sentence will be.
Part of the uncertainty around sentencing is because of a lack of fair legal representation.
Several people who spoke to The Telegraph said that the government had revoked the licences of lawyers who had been hired to represent Christians.
Zhang Kai, whose law firm was working with many of the Zion Church members, including Mr Jin, had his licence revoked recently because he allegedly “disrupted order in the court”.
Several other lawyers at his firm were also forced to step down, including those working on Mr Yang’s wife’s case.
The Chinese government has previously targeted lawyers who have taken on politically sensitive cases, with some suspended and others thrown in prison.
Between 2017 and 2023, at least 30 human rights lawyers had their licences revoked, according to Frontline Defenders, the Irish human rights organisation.
In response to The Telegraph, a spokesman from the Chinese embassy in the UK said it “manages religious affairs in accordance with the law”.
They added that “anti-China forces” had used the guise of religious freedom and human rights to engage in “political manipulation, made sweeping generalisations, maliciously maligned China’s ethnic and religious policies, and fabricated and disseminated disinformation”.
They also said that “judicial organs in China handle cases strictly in accordance with the law and fully safeguard the lawful rights of criminal suspects and defendants throughout judicial proceedings”.
For those watching from a distance as this reality unfolds, it is hard to imagine the circumstances improving any time soon.
Ren Ruiting, a member of the Early Rain Covenant Church who fled to the US following the 2018 crackdowns, said that even thousands of miles from China, she still felt the watchful eye of the CCP.
“If I speak out, they’ll know immediately and they have some way to make me feel bothered and make me feel bad,” said Ms Ruiting.
Like Mr Yang, she doesn’t think she will ever go back to China.
“Once Xi Jinping is still the chairman in China, I don’t think anything will be better and if the persecution is not better, that means we cannot have our church and we are in danger anytime.”
An unusual artifact unearthed at a site in central Israel is offering researchers an unexpected look at far-reaching trade networks, religious traditions, and cultural change that rocked the ancient Near East.
The tiny relic, uncovered at the ancient settlement of Tel Hadid, is nearly 2,700 years old. Archaeologists have identified it as a stamp seal—a common object from this region and period, although upon closer inspection, what it reveals is something more complex than others of its kind.
“The object is remarkable for its material,” writes Tel Aviv University archaeologist Ido Koch and colleagues in a recent paper published in the journal Levant that describes the object. Crafted from mother-of-pearl, the researchers say this stamp seal is quite unlike any other and represents “a medium hitherto undocumented in the southern Levantine stamp seal corpus.”
Normally, stamp seals were made from durable stone during the Iron Age. What prompted the ancient creator of the recovery from Tel Hadid to use a pearl oyster instead remains perplexing, since this brittle material is so delicate that Koch and his colleagues say engraving it would have been extraordinarily difficult using Iron Age tools.
In short, crafting such an artifact from mother-of-pearl using known techniques available to artisans in the Near East nearly 2,700 years ago should have been impossible.
So why did its ancient creator choose to undertake such a demanding task in the first place?
The Tel Hadid site, also known as al-Haditha, is an archaeological site in the Ben Shemen Forest in central Israel found between present-day Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The site overlooks the country’s coastal plain, and 2,700 years ago, its position also would have held strategic importance.
It was there in 2019 that archaeologists uncovered the stamp seal during excavations led by Koch and his team, which they say belonged to Pinctada margaritifera, a species of pearl oyster native to the Red Sea and Persian Gulf. This identification was significant, since it means the raw material traveled hundreds of miles before ultimately reaching the settlement.
Based on its origins and the craftsmanship that obviously went into its creation, Koch and his colleagues believe the unusual artifact reflects the profound changes that followed the Assyrian conquest of the Kingdom of Israel during the late eighth century B.C.E. At the time, populations that had fallen under Assyrian rule were frequently moved to different locations within the empire, resulting in communities that blended cultures normally only connected by expansive trade routes stretching from Mesopotamia to Arabia and beyond.
The stamp seal appears to reflect these far-reaching connections, since the mother-of-pearl is believed to have been carried by one of the many deported families among their valuables. However, it is also possible that the artifact was imported through the flourishing commercial networks that emerged through the rise of the Assyrian Empire.
However, Koch and his colleagues say the engraved design may also provide clues to the artifact’s origins. Instead of depicting imagery with roots among the Israelites, it depicts a crescent moon mounted on a triangular standard—a human figure is also present, raising its arms in apparent worship.
This imagery is associated with the Mesopotamian moon god Sin, whose worshipers spread quietly amidst Assyria’s western provinces. Apart from the imagery it depicts, the shallow nature of the engraving—perhaps a requirement for working with such delicate material—also suggests that instead of functioning as a practical stamping seal, the object may have been worn as an amulet due to its religious significance.
Altogether, the combination of an exotic and unlikely material for the creation of such an item, along with its foreign religious imagery, and the care that went into its creation, all reveal clues that point to multiculturalism within communities under ancient Assyrian rule.
“The seal thus demonstrates how a recognized colonial motif was materially articulated within a western Assyrian provincial context,” Koch and his colleagues write, “while also providing a rare opportunity to examine the practices and constraints of seal engraving on [mother of pearl].”
The team’s study, “A unique mother-of-pearl stamp seal from Late Iron Age Tel Ḥadid, Israel,” was published in Levant.
Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.
A massive stone, deliberately laid on its side and buried within the walls of an ancient Judean home, may provide physical evidence consistent with interpretations of King Hezekiah’s reported religious reforms.
The Hebrew Bible describes the events of Hezekiah’s reforms, including the tearing down of shrines, the destruction of sacred pillars, and the relocation of religious practice from the countryside into royal control in Jerusalem. For decades, archaeologists have searched for evidence of these changes, mostly by studying temples and public worship sites.
A new study by Avraham Faust of Bar-Ilan University, published in the Jerusalem Journal of Archaeology, suggests that important evidence may also be found in private residences.
The study focuses on a massebah, a cultic standing stone about 4.6 feet tall and weighing 750 kilograms, found at Tel ‘Eton in the Judean Lowlands. The stone was originally located inside Building 101, a large residence sometimes referred to as the Governor’s Residency. Archaeologists found it placed in the largest room, directly opposite the entrance, where it functioned as a central feature for anyone entering the building.
Sometime before the Assyrian destruction of Tel ‘Eton at the end of the eighth century BCE, during the period of Hezekiah’s reign, the stone’s status changed. Rather than leaving it upright and visible, the builders laid it on its side and incorporated it into a stone platform. The people responsible did not smash or desecrate the stone. They carefully removed it from use without destroying it.
“Those responsible for changing religious practices may have wished to eliminate the stone’s ritual function, and perhaps wanted the old ritual objects desecrated, but the people who carried out the change seem to have treated it with respect,” Faust said. “They removed it from use without destroying it, effectively neutralizing its cultic significance while preserving the object itself.”
Most searches for evidence of the events of Hezekiah’s reforms have focused on public worship sites, such as the temple at Arad and the dismantled altar at Beersheba. Researchers consider these sites significant, but competing interpretations persist, partly because so few examples exist.
Domestic religious practice presents a different challenge. When a household abandoned a religious object, people often removed or discarded it, leaving no trace for archaeologists to find centuries later. Since ordinary homes do not receive the same archaeological attention as temples and traditional sites of worship, evidence of religious practice located within these residences often disappears rather than being properly preserved or studied. This makes the Tel ‘Eton stone unusual in the archaeological record. People left it in place, buried it, and sealed it inside a platform, where it remained undisturbed for nearly 3,000 years.
Faust does not overstate the discovery. The study does not claim that Hezekiah’s policies directly led to the stone’s decommissioning. The dating places the event only within his reign, but not as a definite result of them. Still, the timing, the method of removal, and the care taken to preserve the object all match a period when religious practice across Judah appears to have been changing.
Scholars still debate whether Hezekiah’s reforms happened as described in the Bible or instead reflect later religious ideas. Either way, this discovery adds a rare example of domestic evidence to a debate usually focused on public religious sites.
Austin Burgess is a writer and researcher with a background in sales, marketing, and data analytics. He holds an MBA, a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration, and a data analytics certification. His work focuses on breaking scientific developments, with an emphasis on emerging biology, cognitive neuroscience, and archaeological discoveries.
Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA’s XMM-Newton satellite, astronomers identified a possible remnant of ancient stellar explosion just a few dozen light-years from Sagittarius A*, a supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy.
The post Astronomers May Have Found Supernova Remnant near Milky Way’s Central Black Hole appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
In 2024, the small chapel at the Protestant church in Lucerne, Switzerland, housed the Deus in Machina installation, where visitors could sit across from an animated “AI Jesus” and pose their questions, and the machine had texts from the Bible and writings from Christian theologians at its disposal to answer their questions. Almost 900 people […]
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