News Feeds

NASA’s Curiosity Rover has been exploring Mars since 2012 and, more recently has found evidence of ice-free ancient ponds and lakes on the surface. The rover found small undulations like those seen in sandy lake-beds on Earth. They would have been created by wind-driven water moving back and forth across the surface. The inescapable conclusion is that the water would have been open to the elements instead of being covered by ice. The discovery suggests the ripples formed 3.7 billion years ago. 

Mars it the fourth planet in our Solar System and the second smallest of all the major planets. It’s known for its strong red colour which is caused by iron oxide in the surface material. Classed as a terrestrial planet, Mars is similar in many ways to Earth with valleys, volcanoes and even evidence of dried up river beds. The similarities end there though with polar caps made mostly of carbon dioxide ice, an unbreathable atmosphere and a surface that is cold and dry. It’s always held a special fascination for us due largely to vague hints through the centuries of alien intelligent but more recently that it may have once been habitable. 

A full-disk view of Mars, courtesy of VMC. Credit: ESA

Once such rover that has been exploring the Martian landscape is the Curiosity Rover that was sent by NASA in 2011. It arrived at Mars in August 2012 and has been exploring the region around Gale Crater ever since. The main objective of Curiosity is to investigate the climate and geology and to assess if it could support primative life in the past. To achieve that end, it’s equipped with an array of instruments from drills to collect soil samples, cameras and instruments to analyse atmospheric samples. 

New simulations are helping inform the Curiosity rover’s ongoing sampling campaign. Credit:NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

A paper recently published in the journal Science Advances by Caltech’s John Grotzinger, Harold Brown Professor of Geology and Michael Lamb, Professor of Geology shared their findings. They found two sets of what seem to be ancient wave ripples on the surface of Mars now thought to be dried up bodes of water with the ripples preserved in rock. The ripples are tiny undulations and are often seen in beaches and lake-beds on Earth as wind-driven water flows across the shallows. The team are particularly excited that this means the water was not frozen and was once open to the elements as liquid. 

The ripples discovered by Curiosity in Gale Crater are the strongest evidence to date that there have been bodies of liquid water in the history of the red planet. Analysis of the rocks and ripples suggest they formed 3.7 billion years ago. It’s thought that the atmosphere and climate of Mars must have been far warmer than it is today and more dense. Dense enough to support liquid water in open air.

NASA’s Curiosity rover continues to search for signs that Mars’ Gale Crater conditions could support microbial life. Photo credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS.

The team were able to create computer models from the ripples they found to attempt to discover the size of lake. The size of the ripples and separation helps to determine how much water was present. The ripple height of 6mm and 4 to 5 cm separation tells us that the lake was shallow, possibly even less than 2 metres deep. One of the sets of ripples known as the Prow outcrop was found in an area that was once wind blown dunes. The other set was found nearby in the sulcate-rich Amapari Marker Band of rocks. The two regions come from slightly different times telling us that the warm dense atmosphere occurred at multiple times or at least for a long period of time. 

The discovery has been a massive help to Mars paleoclimate studies that have tried to map the changing conditions on Mars. NASA’s Opportunity rover was the first mission to discover ripples on the surface but the nature of the bodies of water was uncertain. This latest discovery has given a fascinating insight into the early conditions on Mars, with perhaps, bodies of liquid dotted across the landscape. Further investigation is needed to see how commonplace the ripples are. 

Source : Signatures of Ice-Free Ancient Ponds and Lakes Found on Mars

The post Curiosity Finds Ancient Wave Ripples on Mars appeared first on Universe Today.

The US contributes around a fifth of the budget for the World Health Organization – its withdrawal from the public health body will impede efforts to control the global spread of diseases and could put the US at risk

Gas is the stuff of star formation, and most galaxies have enough gas in their budget to form some stars. However, the picture is a little different for dwarf galaxies. They lack the mass required to hold onto their gas when more massive neighbouring galaxies are siphoning it off.

New research shows that even isolated dwarf galaxies with no overbearing galactic neighbours struggle to form stars. What’s going on?

The research is centred on ultra-faint dwarf (UFD) galaxies. These tiny galaxies are the faintest galaxies in the Universe and contain only a few hundred stars, up to about one thousand. UFDs also contain ample amounts of dark matter. They’re different from globular clusters because globulars contain tens of thousands up to millions of stars and have very little dark matter, maybe none at all.

Because they’re so faint, astronomers struggle to locate them. The ones that have been found are close to the Milky Way. However, that makes them difficult to study because their massive neighbour dominates them. The Milky Way’s gravity and hot corona can siphon the UFDs’ gas away, making it challenging to understand their natural evolution.

Astronomers working with the DECam and the Gemini South Telescope have successfully located three UFDs well beyond the Milky Way’s gravitational influence. Although they weren’t easy to find, astronomers have made significant discoveries about UFDs from them.

The results are in new research published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. It’s titled “Three Quenched, Faint Dwarf Galaxies in the Direction of NGC 300: New Probes of Reionization and Internal Feedback.” The lead author is David Sand, an astronomer from the Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona.

Sand found the three UFDs during a painstaking manual search. The UFDs are so faint that algorithmic searches couldn’t detect them.

“It was during the pandemic,” recalled Sand. “I was watching TV and scrolling through the DESI Legacy Survey viewer, focusing on areas of sky that I knew hadn’t been searched before. It took a few hours of casual searching, and then boom! They just popped out.”

The three UFDs are in the direction of the spiral galaxy NGC 300 and the Sculptor constellation. They’re called Sculptor A, Sculptor B, and Sculptor C.

Sculptor A is about 1.35 Mpc away and is likely at the edge of the Local Group, similar to Tucana B. It’s not a direct satellite of NGC 300.

Sculptor B is about 2.48 Mpc away and is likely behind NGC 300.

Sculptor C is about 2.04 Mpc away and is a satellite of NGC 300.

All three UFDs share some characteristics. They contain mostly old, metal-poor stars, are quenched and do not form any new stars, contain no neutral atomic hydrogen (H i), and emit no UV. “None of the three dwarfs are detected in H i line emission in the H i Parkes All Sky Survey, suggesting that they are not gas rich,” Sand and his co-researchers explain in their paper.

The lack of H I and UV both indicate that the galaxies are quenched and star formation has ceased. “Any younger blue stellar population either has few stars associated with it or is below our detection limit,” the authors write.

The discovery of the Sculptor galaxies, as they’re called, supports theories that say UFDs are dead galaxies that ceased star formation a long time ago in the early Universe. So, finding these faint quenched galaxies is entirely expected.

The jarring thing about their discovery is that they’re isolated. They’re not in proximity to any other larger galaxies that could’ve stripped away their gas and quenched their star formation. “The three dwarf galaxies in this work are among the faintest quenched dwarfs discovered outside the Local Group,” the authors write.

“Many of the recently discovered faint dwarf galaxies beyond the Local Group show distinct signs of recent star formation, although a growing subset also appears to be quenched, with little to no recent star formation,” the authors explain. “The mix of stellar populations of faint dwarf galaxies in the “field” is a critical ingredient for understanding the role of reionization, stellar feedback, and ram pressure from the cosmic web in driving the evolution of the smallest galaxies.”

Finding these three UFDs is significant because of their isolation. Only one of them, Sculptor C, is clearly associated with the nearby NGC 300. Sculptors A and B are isolated. Studying them is an opportunity to learn more about how star formation is affected by internal feedback mechanisms in low-mass galaxies. It’s also an opportunity to learn more about ram-pressure stripping, which is when gas is removed from a galaxy through interactions with the surrounding medium and even cosmic reionization.

During cosmic reionization, also known as the Epoch of Reionization, light from the first stars and galaxies reionized the neutral hydrogen in the intergalactic medium. The high-energy UV photons from the stars and galaxies could’ve effectively boiled away the gas in dwarf galaxies, ending their star formation.

An alternative explanation for UFDs losing their gas is supernova explosions. If some of the first stars in UFDs exploded, they could have expelled the gas and ended star formation. Ram-pressure stripping could also have been responsible.

Astronomers still need to learn more about reionization and if it’s responsible, and the Sculptor galaxies can help them.

“We don’t know how strong or uniform this reionization effect is,” explained Sand. “It could be that reionization is patchy, not occurring everywhere all at once. We’ve found three of these galaxies, but that isn’t enough. It would be nice if we had hundreds of them. If we knew what fraction was affected by reionization, that would tell us something about the early Universe that is very difficult to probe otherwise.”

“The Epoch of Reionization potentially connects the current day structure of all galaxies with the earliest formation of structure on a cosmological scale,” said Martin Still, NSF program director for the International Gemini Observatory. “The DESI Legacy Surveys and detailed follow-up observations by Gemini allow scientists to perform forensic archeology to understand the nature of the Universe and how it evolved to its current state.”

Ultimately, astronomers need to find more of these isolated UFDs to constrain their findings.

“Many more faint and ultrafaint dwarf galaxies are predicted at the edges of the Local Group and in nearby, low-density environments, but initial efforts to find them have not always been successful,” the authors write in their conclusion. That only emphasizes the importance of this discovery.

“Several upcoming programs such as Euclid, the Roman Space Telescope, and the Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time are sure to find many more examples in the years ahead, which will provide demographic properties across environments,” the authors conclude.

Sand presented these results at the recent 245th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society. Find them at the 32:00 mark of this video.

The post The Star-Forming Party Ended Early in Isolated Dwarf Galaxies appeared first on Universe Today.

A brain-computer interface, surgically placed in a research participant with tetraplegia, paralysis in all four limbs, provided an unprecedented level of control over a virtual quadcopter -- just by thinking about moving his unresponsive fingers.

Water desalination plants could replace expensive chemicals with new carbon cloth electrodes that remove boron from seawater, an important step of turning seawater into safe drinking water.

A new computational method gleans more information than its predecessors from maps showing how galaxies are clustered and threaded throughout the universe.

A new computational method gleans more information than its predecessors from maps showing how galaxies are clustered and threaded throughout the universe.

Scientists have developed a computing chip that can learn, correct errors, and process AI tasks.

An interdisciplinary team has developed a groundbreaking technology that addresses key limitations in clean hydrogen production using microwaves. They have also successfully elucidated the underlying mechanism of this innovative process.

Transition metals have long been used as catalysts to activate small molecules and turn them into valuable products. However, as these metals can be expensive and less abundant, scientists are increasingly looking at more common elements as alternatives. In a recent study, researchers used a concept called 'frustrated Lewis pairs' to develop a transition metal-free catalyst for activating hydrogen. This breakthrough could lead to more sustainable, cost-effective, and efficient chemical processes.

Astronomers have discovered extremely powerful winds pummeling the equator of WASP-127b, a giant exoplanet. Reaching speeds up to 33,000 km/h, the winds make up the fastest jet-stream of its kind ever measured on a planet. The discovery provides unique insights into the weather patterns of a distant world.

If you've ever tossed a generous pinch of salt into your pasta pan's water for flavor or as an attempt to make it boil faster, you've likely ended up with a whitish ring of deposits inside the pan. A group of scientists, inspired by this observation during an evening of board games and pasta dinner, wondered what it would take to create the most beautiful salt ring inside the pasta pan they report their findings about what causes these peculiar salt particle cloud deposits to form.

Astronomers previously thought all FRBs were generated by magnetars formed through the explosions of very young, massive stars. But new FRB is pinpointed to the outskirts of 11.3-billion-year-old galaxy without young, active stars -- calling those assumptions into question. 'Just when you think you understand an astrophysical phenomenon, the universe turns around and surprises us,' researcher says.

Instead of relying on energy-hungry reactors to generate high temperatures and pressure, researchers are looking underground at Earth's natural heat and forces to cook up ammonia for fertilizer. In a proof-of-concept study, researchers generated ammonia by mixing nitrogen-laced water with iron-rich rocks -- without any energy input or CO2 emission. This new recipe may lead to a more sustainable alternative to current methods, theoretically churning out enough ammonia for 2.42 million years.

Researchers present paper-based temperature and humidity sensors that are accurate, reliable, and eco-friendly. The team created the sensors by printing silver lines on commercially available paper through dry additive nanomanufacturing. As the paper absorbs water vapor, its capacitance change is measured to reflect the relative humidity of the environment, and as the temperature increases, the metallic conductor experiences an increase in resistivity. They successfully detected changes in relative humidity levels from 20% to 90% and temperature variations from 25 C to 50 C.

The megaflood that refilled the Mediterranean Sea 5 million years ago was so huge and fast that it shaped the landscape of what is now Sicily

From carefully timing meals and bedtime to turning down the lights and banning screens in bed, here's what the scientists who study sleep do to optimise their slumber

The ISS’s orbit is slowly decaying. While it might seem a permanent fixture in the sky, the orbiting space laboratory is only about 400 km above the planet. There might not be a lot of atmosphere at that altitude. However, there is still some, and interacting with that is gradually slowing the orbital speed of the station, decreasing its orbit, and, eventually, pulling it back to Earth. That is, if we didn’t do anything to stop it. Over the 25-year lifespan of the station, hundreds of tons of hydrazine rocket fuel have been carried to it to enable rocket-propelled orbital maneuvers to keep its orbit from decaying. But what if there was a better way – one that was self-powered, inexpensive, and didn’t require constant refueling?

A new paper from Giovanni Anese, a PhD student at the University of Padua, and his team focuses on such a concept. It uses a new idea called a Bare Photovoltaic Tether (BPT), which is based on an older idea of an electrodynamic tether (EDT) but has some advantages due to the addition of solar panels along its length.

The basic idea behind a BPT, and EDTs more generally, is to extend a conductive boom out into a magnetic field and use the natural magnetic forces in the environment to provide a propulsive force. Essentially, it deploys a giant conductive rod into a magnetic field and uses the force on an electric field created in that rod to transfer force to where the rod is connected. It’s like the wind picking up an umbrella if the umbrella were a massive conductive rod and the wind were the planet’s natural magnetic field.

Fraser interviews Rob Hoyt from Tethers Unlimited, one of the companies offering commercial EDTs for satellites.

Electrodynamic tethers are not a new concept. They were initially introduced in 1968 by Giuseppe Colombo and Mario Grossi at Harvard’s Center for Astrophysics. Several demonstration missions have already taken flight, such as the TSS-1R that launched on the Space Shuttle Atlantis in 1996 and successfully deployed a 10-km long tether from the shuttle. Another experiment called the Plasma Motor Generator took place on the Russian space station Mir in 1999, which, instead of using an electromotive force to prove orbital stationkeeping, generated power directly from the tether itself.

Engineers have long considered using an EDT to perform stationkeeping duties on the ISS. However, a technical quirk made it impractical. To get the right sort of forces, the tether would need to be pointed “downward” toward the Earth or “upward” away from the planet.

No matter the direction in which the tether is pointed, it will still require power to operate. Without its magnetic field, caused by the electrical current running through it, it would act as a further drag rather than a boost. Therefore, a traditional EDT must be tied to a power system. However, if an EDT is deployed upward on the ISS, this power system would inhibit the approach corridors of capsules attempting to dock with the station. 

MiTEE is a concept mission from the University of Michigan utilizing Electrodynamic tethers.

This necessitates a downward-facing EDT so it can be connected to the ISS’s power system. While that does work, according to a prior paper published by the authors, it is less than ideal as downward-facing tethers are typically used in de-orbiting maneuvers rather than orbit-boosting ones. 

Enter the BPT. The main difference between it and a traditional EDT is that its surface is at least partially covered in solar panels. If there are enough of them, these solar panels can completely power the system, allowing an upward-facing BPT to operate without being tied into the ISS’s power grid and keeping the approach lanes clear for arriving spacecraft. 

Mr. Anese and his team studied different options in terms of length and solar panel coverage, disregarding the tether’s weight, as the difference in weight between the tether and the ISS itself was several orders of magnitude. They found that they could counteract the relatively small force that causes a 2km/month orbital drop from the ISS by utilizing a 15 km long tether around 97% covered in solar panels, at least on one side.

Fraser discusses orbital station-keeping for the ISS with Michael Rodruck

A 15 km tether might sound absurdly long, and admittedly, if pointing back to the Earth, it would cover a relatively large percentage of the total distance back to the ground. However, it is well within the realm of technological feasibility, especially given that Atlantis deployed that 10 km tether almost 30 years ago.

To prove their point, the authors turned to a software package called FLEXSIM, which allowed them to simulate the orbital dynamics of an ISS attached to different lengths of BPT. The tethers they chose were only 2.5cm wide, and the solar panels were only 4.23% efficient, though that is likely affected by the fact they had to be small and flexible. With that length of solar panels, the system could provide 8.3 kW of power for the whole tether, enough to boost the ISS’s orbital path.

There are some nuances about the effects of solar activity on the forces contributing to the orbital boost, but overall, the system, at least in theory, does seem to work. However, much discussion around the ISS lately has been about its end of life, which could come as early as 2031. So, while there are still a few good years left in the station, it likely won’t benefit as much from the BPT system as it would have a few decades ago. That being said, there will likely be a replacement in orbit someday, and it could benefit from such a system from the outset, which could save hundreds of tons of fuel in orbit over its lifetime.

Learn More:
Anese et al – Bare Photovoltaic Tether characteristics for ISS reboost
UT – Satellites Equipped With a Tether Would be Able to De-Orbit Themselves at the end of Their Life
UT – A New Satellite Is Going to Try to Maintain Low Earth Orbit Without Any Propellant
UT – SpaceX Reveals the Beefed-Up Dragon That Will De-Orbit the ISS

Lead Image:
Force diagram of the BPT tether system on the ISS.
Credit – Anese et al.

The post A Tether Covered in Solar Panels Could Boost the ISS’s Orbit appeared first on Universe Today.

If you click on the link below, you’ll go to Trump’s executive order, signed in his first day in office, ending DEI positions in the government and describing the dismantling of DEI programs.

As readers know, I’m not a fan of Trump, whom I see as dangerously unstable, and I’m not a MAGA-ite. Regardless, neither will I damn everything his administration does as harmful or evil, for that’s simply not the case, and those determined to do that from the outset have a problem.  In this case, the action seems salubrious.

Here’s the whole thing; I’ve put in bold part that I see as especially important:

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered:

Section 1.  Purpose and Policy.  The Biden Administration forced illegal and immoral discrimination programs, going by the name “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI), into virtually all aspects of the Federal Government, in areas ranging from airline safety to the military.  This was a concerted effort stemming from President Biden’s first day in office, when he issued Executive Order 13985, “Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government.”

Pursuant to Executive Order 13985 and follow-on orders, nearly every Federal agency and entity submitted “Equity Action Plans” to detail the ways that they have furthered DEIs infiltration of the Federal Government.  The public release of these plans demonstrated immense public waste and shameful discrimination.  That ends today.  Americans deserve a government committed to serving every person with equal dignity and respect, and to expending precious taxpayer resources only on making America great.

Sec. 2.  Implementation.  (a)  The Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), assisted by the Attorney General and the Director of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), shall coordinate the termination of all discriminatory programs, including illegal DEI and “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear.  To carry out this directive, the Director of OPM, with the assistance of the Attorney General as requested, shall review and revise, as appropriate, all existing Federal employment practices, union contracts, and training policies or programs to comply with this order.  Federal employment practices, including Federal employee performance reviews, shall reward individual initiative, skills, performance, and hard work and shall not under any circumstances consider DEI or DEIA factors, goals, policies, mandates, or requirements.

(b)  Each agency, department, or commission head, in consultation with the Attorney General, the Director of OMB, and the Director of OPM, as appropriate, shall take the following actions within sixty days of this order:

(i)    terminate, to the maximum extent allowed by law, all DEI, DEIA, and “environmental justice” offices and positions (including but not limited to “Chief Diversity Officer” positions); all “equity action plans,” “equity” actions, initiatives, or programs, “equity-related” grants or contracts; and all DEI or DEIA performance requirements for employees, contractors, or grantees.

(ii)   provide the Director of the OMB with a list of all:

(A)  agency or department DEI, DEIA, or “environmental justice” positions, committees, programs, services, activities, budgets, and expenditures in existence on November 4, 2024, and an assessment of whether these positions, committees, programs, services, activities, budgets, and expenditures have been misleadingly relabeled in an attempt to preserve their pre-November 4, 2024 function;

(B)  Federal contractors who have provided DEI training or DEI training materials to agency or department employees; and

(C)  Federal grantees who received Federal funding to provide or advance DEI, DEIA, or “environmental justice” programs, services, or activities since January 20, 2021.

(iii)  direct the deputy agency or department head to:

(A) assess the operational impact (e.g., the number of new DEI hires) and cost of the prior administration’s DEI, DEIA, and “environmental justice” programs and policies; and

(B) recommend actions, such as Congressional notifications under 28 U.S.C. 530D, to align agency or department programs, activities, policies, regulations, guidance, employment practices, enforcement activities, contracts (including set-asides), grants, consent orders, and litigating positions with the policy of equal dignity and respect identified in section 1 of this order.  The agency or department head and the Director of OMB shall jointly ensure that the deputy agency or department head has the authority and resources needed to carry out this directive.

(c)  To inform and advise the President, so that he may formulate appropriate and effective civil-rights policies for the Executive Branch, the Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy shall convene a monthly meeting attended by the Director of OMB, the Director of OPM, and each deputy agency or department head to:

(i)    hear reports on the prevalence and the economic and social costs of DEI, DEIA, and “environmental justice” in agency or department programs, activities, policies, regulations, guidance, employment practices, enforcement activities, contracts (including set-asides), grants, consent orders, and litigating positions;

(ii)   discuss any barriers to measures to comply with this order; and

(iii)  monitor and track agency and department progress and identify potential areas for additional Presidential or legislative action to advance the policy of equal dignity and respect.

Sec. 3.  Severability.  If any provision of this order, or the application of any provision to any person or circumstance, is held to be invalid, the remainder of this order and the application of its provisions to any other persons or circumstances shall not be affected.

Sec. 4.  General Provisions.  (a)  Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:

(i)   the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof; or

(ii)  the functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.

(b)  This order shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.

(c)  This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.

THE WHITE HOUSE,

January 20, 2025.

Although I feel that the government (and its citizens) need to give people in the underclass a hand up, I think in general that has to be through the creation of a system of equal opportunities from birth rather than equal representation in colleges and hiring (“equity”). Inequities are often imputed to structural racism acting right now, but, at least in academia, that doesn’t seem to be the case. If racism or misogyny is a cause, it was bigotry in the past whose effects persist in the present, reducing equal opportunity. While it’s a lot harder to effect equal opportunity, as that means effacing the environmental differences that, say, hold back black and Hispanic children from accessing good educations and decent resources.  Rectifying this also involve effacing cultural differences, for example the attitude that I’ve seen that smart minority kids, and those who study hard, are somehow  “acting white”—something to be denigrated.  Fixing this entails a herculean task which will cost money (even worse, creating cultural changes, for we know that simply throwing more money at schools doesn’t improve education).  But it’s the only way to help those who, for no fault of their own, lack opportunity.

That said, the solution is not DEI programs, which have not done anything to equalize opportunity, and have effaced the idea of merit, replacing it with identity. By the time DEI programs kick in, usually in or after college or in hiring after high school, it’s too late. Further, it’s widely recognized that DEI training does not change people’s attitudes.

Finally, there is a sense of palpable unfairness with aspects of DEI that are racist in the sense that people are advanced at high levels because of their ancestry.  One example in science are grants that are either given out preferentially to investigators from minority groups or, especially, grants given out with DEI aims: grants designed to show that structural racism is responsible for inequities X, Y, and Z. (See this post on how National Science Foundation grants studying DEI issues have gone from 0.29% of all grants in 2021 ($14,280,928) to 27.21% of all grants ($289,593,584) in 2024. All scientists are aware of this, and of the paucity of anything useful coming from such funding.

Under the new order, not only will all DEI positions and programs be terminated in the government, including jobs relabeled to hide the fact that they were DEI positions. As section ii(E) suggests, this would also include federal grant money used to further equity, which presumably means federal grants to science.

These are early days, and it’s not clear to me whether public universities or schools with DEI programs will have to terminate them or surrender government funding, but if that’s the case, places like the University of Michigan are going to lose a lot of jobs.

And it looks as if the requirement of including DEI statements for job applications is on its way down the drain. That is good because I consider this compulsory speech that is prima facie illegal, though almost nobody’s challenged this in court.

You heard it here first, folks, so the New Yorker was slow on the uptake (and they don’t have the photos and videos that I featured). At any rate, the new issue features the recent story of Robert Lang, master origami artist and reader, whose wildlife photographs have been featured here often (and there are more to come).  If you don’t have a subscription, you can click on the NYer headline below and read the piece perhaps once, but otherwise I’ll give some excerpts from the story and add that a judicious inquiry might yield a pdf.

First, though, have a look at Robert’s origami page to see the incredible art he’s made. (I’ll wager he’s one of the ten best origami artists in the world.) As he told me, he lost virtually all of the art he had kept during the fire, which burned up his and his wife’s old home and studio, as well as a new home down the block. They have insurance and will rebuild.  In the meantime, I told him that I still had an origami duck he folded for me, and he responded that it was probably one of the few surviving original Langs.  It sits atop my computer, and here it is (it is another version of his “Duck Opus 11” on watercolor paper that you can see here).

And the story:

Here are some excerpts:

“The first thing you think of when you see your home engulfed in flames is, My world and future have changed,” Robert J. Lang, one of the world’s foremost origami artists and theorists, said recently. He was sitting in a small hotel room in Arcadia, California. The week prior, the house where he lived with his wife, Diane, had burned down when the Eaton Fire erupted and swept through Altadena, outside Los Angeles, with incredible speed, levelling entire neighborhoods. Robert’s studio, a separate property where he kept decades of his professional origami work—all highly flammable— along with research and personal artifacts, was also reduced to ash.

Diane walked in with their two dogs, Casey and Scout, who hopped onto the mattress and lay down. Diane, with no other place to sit in the room, joined them. “Two people offered their back yards for them to wander around in,” she said. “So, we were just in a back yard.”

The Langs had gone to sleep on a Monday night in their own bed. By Tuesday night, they were sleeping in their cars, with their many pets—the two dogs, two desert tortoises (Sal and Rhody), a Russian tortoise (Ivan), a snake (Sandy), and a tarantula (Nicki)—and the few things they could grab as they fled the inferno. The snake, tortoises, and tarantula were now being taken care of at the San Dimas Canyon Nature Center, rather than staying at the hotel. “Just to make my life simpler,” Diane, who works with the Eaton Canyon Nature Center, said.

In the early hours of Wednesday morning, Robert watched his studio burn from a nearby ridge. Then, at around 9 A.M., he and Diane learned that their home was destroyed. At sixty-three years old, Robert, who was profiled in this magazine in 2007, has been designing origami for most of his life; one of his early designs, in the seventies, was an origami Jimmy Carter. He used to be a physicist, working on things like semiconductor lasers, at places such as NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, before he decided to devote his time fully to origami. The studio held much of his art, and all of his tools. The laser cutter he used to help make prototypes had melted. “It’s now a pile of metal,” he said. “A 3-D printer is now a pile of ash.” Rare paper, including fig-based paper from a tiny village in Mexico, had burned. He went on, “There were correspondence letters with other origami artists over the years that were a historical record for me and perhaps for others. And then my exhibition collection was there. The pieces I had in MoMA”—a large grizzly bear, a bull moose, and a fiddler crab, all folded between 2003 and 2007—“are gone.” As he evacuated, however, he was able to grab a single piece of art work, perhaps his most famous: a framed, fifteen-inch cuckoo clock folded into dazzling complexity from a single sheet of paper

. . . .Most of the Langs’ days now are spent on details. Dealing with insurance. Filing documents of everything lost. Texting with neighbors. Walking the dogs. Checking the weather for changes in wind. Monitoring evacuation zone updates from the Watch Duty app. And, mainly, finding a more stable place to live.

Robert’s phone rang. Their real-estate agent had a prospective rental apartment they could see that afternoon.

“Ask him about the dogs,” Diane said to Robert. She explained, “We’d founda place we liked—a good vibe. But the owner said he didn’t want dogs.”

Robert hung up. “They take dogs,” he said. “We can see it at 3 P.M.”

“It’ll probably be for two years,” Diane said. “But we’ll rebuild. We still have our land. We even have the floor plans.”

And they will rebuild on the site of their new home and of their original studio. It may take a couple of years, but, as I said in my previous post, the Langs are remarkably resilient and are just getting on with what they need to do.

As for the cuckoo clock he saved: here it is, reproduced with permission. You can see it and read about it here, but he adds:

This is the one I saved.  There are four of them in existence (that I folded; lots of other people have followed the folding instructions to make their own versions). One of them was also in a fire that destroyed the owners’ apartment, but almost miraculously, it survived. He had a fourth-floor apartment in a building in which all the interior collapsed in the fire. After the fire, he was poking through the rubble in the basement, lifted a collapsed door that he recognized as his, and found the cuckoo clock, flattened, but unburnt. He sent it to me, and I spent some time restoring it (dampening, wiping off the ash that caked it, and re-folding/re-shaping it). I eventually got it back to its original appearance, though it still had bits of ash in crevices and smelled of smoke, but that just added to its character, and to my knowledge, it survives to this day.]

Here’s the first time I met Robert—at the Kent Presents meeting in Connecticut in August, 2018. (There’s a description here; sadly I’ve removed all photos from this site before January of last year because of copyright claims by stupid and venal firms, but there is a video of some origami that I’ve put below.) This photo shows part of Robert’s presentation, which was accompanied by slides of his artwork). Here Lang (left) talks to biology Nobel laureate Harold Varmus:

Here’s the video showing some of Robert’s origami: