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Systems that can harvest water from moisture in the atmosphere could offer a valuable water source in the wake of disasters

A new technique enables makers to finely tune the color, shade, and texture of 3D-printed objects using only one material. The method is faster and uses less material than other approaches.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and New Horizons spacecraft simultaneously set their sights on Uranus recently, allowing scientists to make a direct comparison of the planet from two very different viewpoints. The results inform future plans to study like types of planets around other stars.

Researchers have used the chemical fingerprints of zinc contained in meteorites to determine the origin of volatile elements on Earth. The results suggest that without 'unmelted' asteroids, there may not have been enough of these compounds on Earth for life to emerge.

Scientists have used light to visualize magnetic domains, and manipulated these regions using an electric field, in a quantum antiferromagnet. This method allows real-time observation of magnetic behaviors, paving the way for advancements in next-generation electronics and memory devices, as well as a deeper understanding of quantum materials.

Scientists have used light to visualize magnetic domains, and manipulated these regions using an electric field, in a quantum antiferromagnet. This method allows real-time observation of magnetic behaviors, paving the way for advancements in next-generation electronics and memory devices, as well as a deeper understanding of quantum materials.

Researchers have successfully develop single-atom editing technology that maximizes drug efficacy.

A collection-based survey of lichen species at the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah, USA and Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station in Nunavut, Canada was conducted as part of the Mars-160 mission, a simulation of Martian surface exploration. The survey identified 48 lichen taxa, with 35 species from the Utah site and 13 species from the Canadian site.

Astronomers have used the NASA/ESA James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to observe the 'inside-out' growth of a galaxy in the early universe, only 700 million years after the Big Bang.

Researchers devised a way to expand tissue 20-fold in a single step. Their simple, inexpensive method could pave the way for nearly any biology lab to perform nanoscale imaging.

Sometimes, we try to capture a QR code with a good digital camera on a smartphone, but the reading eventually fails. This usually happens when the QR code itself is of poor image quality, or if it has been printed on surfaces that are not flat -- deformed or with irregularities of unknown pattern -- such as the wrapping of a courier package or a tray of prepared food. Now, a team has designed a methodology that facilitates the recognition of QR codes in these physical environments where reading is more complicated.

Researchers have made a significant advancement in understanding the underlying heating mechanism of the sun's atmosphere, finding that reflected plasma waves could drive the heating of coronal holes.

Researchers have developed and demonstrated a technique that allows them to engineer a class of materials called layered hybrid perovskites (LHPs) down to the atomic level, which dictates precisely how the materials convert electrical charge into light. The technique opens the door to engineering materials tailored for use in next-generation printed LEDs and lasers -- and holds promise for engineering other materials for use in photovoltaic devices.

Researchers have developed and demonstrated a technique that allows them to engineer a class of materials called layered hybrid perovskites (LHPs) down to the atomic level, which dictates precisely how the materials convert electrical charge into light. The technique opens the door to engineering materials tailored for use in next-generation printed LEDs and lasers -- and holds promise for engineering other materials for use in photovoltaic devices.

Spear-throwing tools called atlatls allow humans to launch projectiles over great distances, but Neanderthals apparently never used them – and an experiment involving a 9-metre-tall platform may explain why

Millions of years ago, our ancestors lost a gene for producing vitamin C and got a taste for citrus. Since then, we've cultivated the tangy fruits into global staples like sweet oranges and sour lemons

This article, from Pirate Wires, shows something that many of us already knew: there’s a thriving industry out there to either create or buff up your Wikipedia page, despite it being against the rules.  (I note immediately that I neither created nor had anyone buff up my page.)

There are two types of editing: “white hat editing” in which paid interests are disclosed and direct edits aren’t made, and which may be okay (I don’t agree), and “black hat editing,” in which edits are made without conflicts of interest being disclosed, which is definitely against Wikipedia’s rules. New article are even created to boost businesses or organizations. Both of the latter two are against Wikipedia’s rules, but are hard to police.

I’ll give just a few examples to show you what kind of stuff is subject to paid editing:

. . . . . Today, Wikipedia’s list of black-hat editors includes over 200 companies, many of which operate dozens of front companies and subsidiary brands. One of the biggest and highest-profile is Abtach, a Pakistani firm founded in 2015 linked to an IT company called Intermarket Group. On Wikipedia, Abtach has been tied to at least 130 different Wikipedia editing front companies that operate under domains like Wikicreatorsinc.com, Wikicreation.services, Wikipedia Pro, Wikipedia Legends, and USAwikispecialists.com. Alongside its Wikipedia activities, Abtach’s owners run a parallel business selling low-cost trademark applications under names like Trademark Terminal, Trademark Eminent, Trademark Excel and more than a dozen others. In 2022, the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) found that firms tied to Abtach had defrauded customers, in some cases by billing them for multiple filings when only one single-class trademark was filed. USPTO invalidated 5,500 trademarks as a result of the investigation and Google banned the companies from advertising. The previous year, the Federal Investigation Agency, Pakistan’s equivalent to the FBI, investigated the company for criminal fraud.

While Abtach may have pushed the boundaries farther than most, there are hundreds of Abtach-like companies out there — many based in Pakistan, India and Ukraine, but some of the longest standing and most impactful in the UK, Switzerland, France, Spain and the US — each with a profusion of front sites and domains ready to slurp up overflowing demand. Most of what these black hat firms offer is a kind of blunt-force approach to reputation management. For $1,200 to $1,500, they promise to create a Wikipedia article about you or your company. The process will take around a week (or so you’ll be told) with half the payment made up front and the other half upon completion. Payments are usually made in the form of bank wires, which are much more difficult to reverse than credit card charges. Frequently, the newly created article will be taken down by Wikipedia community editors patrolling for articles that don’t meet the site’s notability threshold. In some of these cases, black-hat companies will demand further payment to get the article back up, forcing clients to double the $1,500 investment, then triple it, etc.

And oy, the NYT does it!

While the mainstream media has covered the issue of Wikipedia editing, they have not been immune to its temptations. In 2020, during the lead-up to A.G. Sulzberger — the scion to the Sulzberger dynasty that controls the New York Times — assuming the chairman position at the newspaper, the Times hired one of the first and most highly regarded white-hat Wikipedia firms, Beutler Ink. Readying A.G. for the new post at the height of the #MeToo movement, the firm requested community editors beef up of the section on the incoming chairman’s journalistic experience, including a heroic account of Sulzberger’s time as an intern at the Providence Journal, where he “revealed” a local country club was not open to women. A range of other similar additions were requested — and made — including Sulzberger’s stint at The Oregonian newspaper, “writing more than 300 pieces about local government and public life, including a series of investigative exposés on misconduct by Multnomah County Sheriff Bernie Giusto” — language provided almost verbatim by Beutler Ink.

This seems unethical for a newspaper, and especially unethical for what is supposed to be a leading and reputable newspaper.  A few more clients, which will surprise you.

The list of Beutler Ink’s clients alone reveals the staggering scale of this activity. A small sample includes media executive and Democratic mega donor Jeffrey Katzenberg, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman, Simon and Schuster CEO Jonathan Karl and Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks. Corporate clients include Reddit, MetLife, Accenture, Intel, IBM, Hubspot, Hilton, Vox Media, Dick’s Sporting Goods, United Airlines, Amdocs, Gallup, Allergan, Breyers, Vimeo and Waymo.

The PR tactics and marketing KPIs involved are just as diverse. While the New York Times turned to Wikipedia to burnish its brand, NBC News hired a white-hat firm to do damage control during a period of major upheaval. The scandal began when Today show host and media super-star Matt Lauer was abruptly fired in 2017 following serious allegations of sexual misconduct. In October 2019, an excerpt from a book by Ronan Farrow reported shocking details on the allegations, and claims top NBC executives, including NBC News chairman Andrew Lack and president Noah Oppenheim, quashed Farrow’s reporting on the scandal when he was at the network.

The revelations sent NBC into a tailspin. . .

Does this mean you can’t trust Wikipedia? No, though Greg Mayer has been promising me a post on “What’s the matter with Wikipedia?” for about a decade now.  But surely nobody is going to pay to have articles about specific species of animals, chemical compounds, some biographies altered. But as for politics, history, or currently controversial subjects (including people), caveat emptor!

A chemical produced by gut bacteria could be the basis for a non-invasive test for endometriosis – and mouse experiments suggest it might also help treat the condition

A vaccination campaign targeting ducks, the farm birds most at risk of getting and spreading bird flu, succeeded in greatly reducing outbreaks of the virus on poultry farms in France

Well, I guess I was premature in announcing the death of DEI in academia. Although some DEI programs are being dismantled or reduced in universities, the ideology they espouse is just now filtering into federal science-granting agencies. The report below from the Free Press shows that the National Science Foundation (NSF) is using a lot of taxpayers’ money funding DEI-related projects infused not only with ideology, but with postmodernism and verbal contortion. They don’t seem to be projects designed to find out something about the real world, but to impose progressive ideology on the real world.

Click below to see the article, or find it archived here:

Some excerpts from the article, though a description of funded grants (also given) tells the tale:

If you thought the august National Science Foundation focused only on string theory or the origins of life, you haven’t spent much time in a university lab lately. Thanks to a major shift endorsed by the Biden administration, recent grants have gone to researchers seeking to identify “hegemonic narratives” and their effect on “non-normative forms of gender and sexuality,” plus “systematic racism” in the education of math teachers and “sex/gender narratives in undergraduate biology and their impacts on transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming students.”

A new report from Republican members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation made available to The Free Press says that DEI considerations now profoundly shape NSF grant decisions.

. . . The report, titled “DEI: Division. Extremism. Ideology,” analyzed all National Science Foundation grants from 2021 through April 2024. More than 10 percent of those grants, totaling over $2 billion, prioritized attributes of the grant proposals other than their scientific quality, according to the report.

What’s more, that’s a feature—not a bug—of the new grant-making process. Biden’s 2021 Scientific Integrity Task Force released a report in January 2022, stating that “activities counter to [DEIA] values are disruptive to the conduct of science.”

“DEIA” expands the concept of diversity, equity, and inclusion to include “accessibility.”

Yes, it’s Republicans, but you’re not going to find “progressive” Democrats combing through the list of NSF awards to find “studies” proposals. (The search was done using “terms associated with social justice, gender, race, and individuals belonging to underrepresented groups”.) And yes, the report has a political agenda, but have a look at the grants that were funded as well as the amount of money devoted to that funding. These things can be checked.

So, here are some projects funded by American taxpayers to the tune of $2 billion. The report also notes that while these Social Justice grants constituted less than 1% of NSF grants in 2021, ballooned to constitute 27% of all grants between January and April of this year. The first grant is for more than a million bucks!

• Shirin Vossoughi, an associate professor of learning sciences at Northwestern University, is co-principal investigator for a $1,034,751 2023 NSF grant for a project entitled “Reimagining Educator Learning Pathways Through Storywork for Racial Equity in STEM.” The project’s abstract says that current teaching practices reproduce “inequitable” structures in the teaching of STEM subjects and “perpetuate racial inequalities” within STEM contexts. Her public writing, such as in a co-authored 2020 op-ed, argues that all American institutions, including STEM education, are “permeated” by the “ideology of white supremacy.” Vossoughi could not immediately be reached for comment.
• A 2023 NSF grant for $323,684 to Stephen Secules, assistant professor in the College of Education & Computing at Florida International University, intends to “transform engineering classrooms towards racial equity.” Secules has also been critical of the fact that “engineering professors are not engaging as active change agents for racial equity.” Secules could not be reached for comment.
• The NSF provided a total of $569,851 split among Florida International University, Colorado State University, and University of Minnesota for a project to examine “sex/gender narratives in undergraduate biology and their impacts on transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming students.”
• And the University of Georgia received $644,642 to “identify systemic racism in mathematics teacher education.”

Asked for comment, the NSF said this:

An NSF spokesperson did not specifically address the committee’s report when I reached out. But they said the “NSF’s merit review process has two criteria—intellectual merit and broader impacts—and is the global gold standard for evaluating scientific proposals.” Their statement continued, “NSF will continue to emphasize the importance of the broader impacts criterion in the merit review process.”

And indeed, those “broader impacts,” which used to explain how one’s project would improve public understanding of science, have now been broadened to include “diversity” and “STEM engagement.”  What has happened in all four grants above is that these two “broader impacts” have merged to become the main subject of the grant. What we have above is sociology mixed with ideology to advance (not simply to “investigate”) Social Justice. For example, the last project, apparently aimed at identifying “systemic racism in mathematics teacher education” will no doubt SNIFF OUT that systemic racism. It just wouldn’t do it, as is likely, if the results (and the PI’s report) said “we looked for systemic racism in this area and didn’t find much.”

Clearly, the NSF has expanded its mission from fostering public understanding and adoption of science to fostering Social Justice.

Let us remember that the Dispenser of Grants is called the National Science Foundation. What we have above could be construed as science education, but it’s education of a peculiar sort: designed to ensure that science education is forced into the Procrustean Be of “progressive” ideology.  And that, I suspect, is two billion dollars that could have been used to do real science, or even to improve science education in a non-ideological way. But instead the money seems to have gone into the dumpster. Is it any surprise that three of the five awardees, when contacted by the Free Press, “could not be reached for comment”?