At first, he developed a neural predictor aimed at determining whether someone was lying. It appeared to succeed. Yet in a follow-up experiment, he and his team applied that neural lie detector to people who were telling truthful statements that served their own interests. That complicated things: “And then we show that brain decoder, that lie detector that we thought we had, can also predict when somebody’s just being selfish,” he said.

In the experiment’s final phase, the researchers attempted to remove the neural activity tied to selfishness to distinguish it from the signals associated with lying. They were able to do so. Lee noted that later they may discover the leftover signal labeled “lying” is still mixed with other mental states, such as arousal. After identifying and cutting away all such entanglements, he argued, what remains should be pure lying—at least in theory. “It could also be an empirical result that if we take enough of these compounded processes away, deception disintegrates,” he said. In other words, there might not be a single, pure lying state; perhaps lying is merely the sum of many components.

Researchers like Lee might be edging closer to a more accurate lie detector, improving on the conventional polygraph. But there’s no miraculous fix right now. And, as Lee’s findings imply, the issue may be ontological rather than technological.

That’s Maschke’s firm position. “It’s all pseudoscience,” he said. “There is no lie detector. So my thinking is that it’s better not to pretend that you can detect lies, because it’s a way of deceiving yourself.”

Maybe it’s true that no one can be certain if another person is lying. After all, people are famously individuals. “Everybody’s so different in how they tell their lie,” Denkinger said. And, apparently, in how they tell their truths.

This piece first appeared on Undark. Read the original article.

About 300 million years ago, the skies of the late Palaeozoic teemed with massive insects. Meganeuropsis permiana, a predatory species similar to a modern dragonfly, had a wingspan topping 70 centimetres and weighed roughly 100 grams. Scientists studying these prehistoric giants wondered why insects no longer reach such sizes. Three decades ago they proposed an answer, the so-called “oxygen constraint hypothesis.”

For many years the prevailing view was that dragonfly-sized insects required an atmosphere richer in oxygen to survive because insect respiratory systems are less efficient than those of mammals, birds, or reptiles. As atmospheric oxygen fell, the theory went, the conditions could no longer sustain gigantic bugs. “It’s a simple, elegant explanation,” said Edward Snelling, a professor of veterinary science at the University of Pretoria. “But it’s wrong.”

Insect breathing

Unlike mammals, insects lack a central pair of lungs and a closed circulatory network that transports oxygenated blood to tissues. “They respire through an internal network of tubes called the tracheal system,” Snelling explained.

Air gets into an insect’s body through small openings in the exoskeleton called spiracles. From there it moves into larger tubes, the tracheae, which branch repeatedly into very fine, blind-ending tracheoles. Those tracheoles extend into the tissues, and mitochondria in adjacent cells often sit close to them.

Insects can actively move air through the larger tracheae by flexing their bodies, but this active ventilation does not reach the tiny tracheoles. At that final stage, oxygen must cross into tissue by passive diffusion.

Diffusion is slow, which is the central problem. The oxygen constraint hypothesis argued that as an insect grows, oxygen must travel farther to reach inner tissues.

“As the insects get bigger and bigger, the challenge of diffusion becomes greater,” Snelling said.

To keep muscles from suffocating, a larger insect would need much wider or many more tracheoles to sustain oxygen delivery, implying a structural limit. If an insect became too large, the volume of air tubes required to oxygenate its muscles would occupy too much space, crowding the very muscle fibers they were meant to feed and greatly reducing flight capability.

The findings differed by 18 standard deviations from the predictions of Bell’s theorem, strongly indicating that a superposition of temporal order is an intrinsic feature of quantum mechanics.

Yet the experiment is at a stage similar to early entanglement work: numerous loopholes remain. For example, most photons are lost during the procedure (only about 1 percent of those injected emerge on the other side to be measured). It is technically possible that those losses were biased toward a subset of photons that would otherwise display correlations compatible with hidden-variable explanations.

The team also didn’t separate the equipment by sufficient distances to exclude influences traveling slower than light, and indefinite causal-order experiments introduce a few other peculiarities. Still, the study points toward follow-up experiments that could seal these gaps, and past progress shows such loopholes can be closed.

Usually, when reporting on something this strange, all we can do is marvel at how odd reality is compared with our expectations. This instance is different: the physics involved is already known to have many practical uses.

“The [device used in this work] could also be of interest for applications, as it has been shown to outperform causally ordered processes across a wide range of tasks such as channel discrimination, promise problems, communication complexity, noise mitigation, various thermodynamic applications, quantum metrology, quantum key distribution, entanglement generation, and distillation, among others,” the authors note.

Put another way, being uncertain about the order of time may actually prove useful.

* I wouldn’t have known this work existed if I hadn’t read an excellent summary of it on the American Physical Society news site.

PRX Quantum, 2026. DOI: 10.1103/5t2y-ddmt  (About DOIs).

The seas contain highly effective, intricate traps: nets, hooks, and fishing lines. Built to catch animals meant for our plates, they frequently ensnare other wildlife as well.

This accidental harvest is known as bycatch, and every year it results in the deaths of millions of marine animals, including whales, dolphins, sharks, turtles, and seabirds. Nets and gear can suffocate or inflict fatal wounds; even when animals are thrown back into the sea, they often do not survive. Bycatch is also a problem for fishers—entangled animals can damage equipment, wasting time and money and harming fisheries’ reputations.

Over the years, conservationists, scientists, and fishermen have devised methods to cut different types of bycatch across fisheries worldwide. Yet putting these fixes into practice is frequently difficult, and many mitigation measures never achieve widespread use.

Fishing gear that entangles dolphins, porpoises, and whales poses a serious threat to these animals. Here, gear trails from the North Atlantic right whale called Snowcone (known individual #3560) who swims with her calf in waters off Georgia.

Credit:
Georgia Dept. of Natural Resources NOAA permit #20556

Some methods, however, already show measurable success—and more options may be coming. Recent studies have tested nets fitted with lights; even simple fixes like attaching plastic water bottles to gear appear to reduce certain kinds of bycatch while remaining feasible for fishermen to adopt.

Despite the hurdles, researchers are optimistic. “There are not very many conservation issues that I’m aware of where industry and conservationists and consumers and the fishermen and the resource users all want the same thing,” says marine biologist Matthew Savoca, a research scientist at Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station. “Every stakeholder wants less bycatch.”

Preventing turtle entanglement

Bycatch has long been a part of fishing. “It’s a conflict that’s intrinsic to the whole idea of fishing,” says marine scientist Nancy Knowlton, marine biologist emerita at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. “If you have something that’s designed to catch animals, you’re going to wind up, almost always, catching some things that you didn’t mean to catch.”