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New Zealand’s attempt to integrate indigenous ways of knowing with modern science takes place not only on the secondary-school level, but also at universities, including the most prestigious one in the country: The University of Auckland. The course below (“Aotearoa” is the Māori word for New Zealand, and is now inseparable from “New Zealand”) is required for all first-year science students at the University under the University’s “Curriculum Framework Transformation” (CFT) plan. There will be a version of this course for all other faculties as well, so it’s a general requirement.

Click below to read it (and download a pdf), and I’ll put the gist of the course below (bolding is mine):

 

Course Prescription What does it mean to do science here and now? This course considers how knowledge of place enhances your learning, the significance of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, and how knowledge systems frame understanding. Students will think critically about the relationships between science and our environment, along with the ethics of science in practice. Course Overview

Contemporary science is deeply entwined with place, knowledge systems and ethics. This course examines these concepts through the lens of sustainability to demonstrate how they shape research agendas, methodologies, and applications of contemporary science. To address the environmental, social, and economic dimensions of sustainability, science must recognise and navigate the complexities of these interrelated concepts.

Explore the role of place-based knowledge, the importance of embracing diverse knowledge systems for science and the ethical responsibilities inherent in contemporary science in Aotearoa New Zealand. This interdisciplinary course will challenge you to think critically, fostering an awareness of the intricate relationships between science and its broader context, including Te Tiriti o Waitangi. Capabilities Developed in this Course Capability 1: People and Place Capability 2: Sustainability Capability 3: Knowledge and Practice Capability 4: Critical Thinking Capability 6: Communication Capability 7: Collaboration Capability 8: Ethics and Professionalism Graduate Profile: Bachelor of Science Learning Outcomes By the end of this course, students will be able to:

1. Demonstrate how place, and an understanding of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, are significant to your field of study (Capability 1, 3, 4, 6, 7 and 8)
2. Critically and constructively engage with knowledge systems, practices and positionality (Capability 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 and 7)
3. Employ a reciprocal, values-based approach to collaborating (Capability 4, 6, 7 and 8)
4. Communicate ideas clearly, effectively and respectfully (Capability 6, 7 and 8)
5. Reflexively engage with the question of ethics in academic practice (Capability 1, 3, 4, 6, 7 and 8)
6. Demonstrate a critical understanding of sustainability (Capability 2, 3 and 4)

Seriously, is this going to be useful to the students, or will it just confuse them and waste their time?

Note that Te Tiriti o Waitangi is the Treaty of Waitangi, signed by some (but not all) Māori tribes in 1840. It established the rights of Māori and the English colonists, giving the Crown full sovereignty over the country but also giving Māori the right to keep their lands while making them full British subjects.  It has been interpreted, with respect to education, as mandating that Māori “ways of knowing” (Mātauranga Māori)  must be given equal treatment in schools to modern “ways of knowing”.  I’ve discussed that requirement ad nauseam, and won’t go over it here, except to say that mandating this coequality is a foolish and counterproductive thing to do, at least if New Zealand wants to enter the era of modern science.

 

This educational coequality of modern science with a mixture of trial-and-error empirical knowledge indigenous practices, which include spirituality, religion, ideology, eommunality, tradition, and ethics—this coequality is a dubious and contested interpretation of the Treaty. But the Māori are regarded as sacred victims, and an ethos has arisen in New Zealand that this coequality cannot be questioned. People have been fired or demonized for questioning it. Nevertheless, if the country wants its students given a proper science education, infusing it with local lore is not the way to go.  As one local said when he saw this course, “Its primary purposes seem to be pushing an activist view of the Treaty of Waitangi and pushing the validity of Mātauranga Māori as an alternative knowledge system.”

 

Indeed, and that’s from someone familiar with science education in New Zealand. Now there’s no issue with teaching local “ways of knowing” in anthropology or sociology courses, but “indigenous science” often proves to be infused with nonscientific stuff like oral tradition, myth, and religion/spirituality.  To pretend that the Treaty is essential for first-year students, and that alternative “ways of knowing” are just as good as modern ones, is to begin propagandizing science students in their first year at University.

At least New Zealand can’t say it hasn’t been warned of the consequences of this form of wokeness. As the country continues to drop in science rankings compared to countries like the U.S. and Canada, it may reach a point where people think, “Wait a minute; what are we doing?”

They haven’t gotten close to that point yet.

While ultra-processed food is the latest buzzword in nutrition, the scientific evidence for how it affects our health continues to point in different directions. Why can't researchers just tell us the perfect diet?

Recent fossil finds suggest that big brains weren't an evolutionary asset to our ancestors but evolved by accident – and are likely to shrink again in the near future

This is one small example, but an important one, of how science in New Zealand is being corrupted by trying to comport it with the indigenous “way of knowing”, Mātauranga Māori (MM).

The article below, from the July 4 New Zealand Herald (the biggest newspaper in the country) describes a science fair in the town of Rotorua, highlighting one student project that “tests” whether they could “prove” that a legend might be true.  (There are other projects highlighting MM and indigenous knowledge.)

This was sent to me anonymously, for of course criticizing stuff like this in New Zealand could cost you your job and/or your reputation.  The indigenous people, their myths, and their “ways of knowing” are regarded as sacred and untouchable.

The story is that of the love story of Tūtānekai and Hinemoa, recounted in Grey’s ‘Polynesian Mythology’, first published in 1855. The legend involves a Māori man who wanted to run away with a woman, and lured her to an island in a lake by playing his flute:

Every night Tūtānekai sat on a high hill and played his flute, the wind carrying his music across the lake to Hinemoa’s home. But Hinemoa did not come. Her people had suspected her intention, and they had pulled all the canoes high up on the shore.

Every night Hinemoa heard the sound of her lover’s flute and wept because she could not go to him. Eventually she wondered if it be possible to swim across to Tūtānekai.

Hinemoa took six hollow gourds and fastened them to her body to buoy her up. The night was dark and the great lake cold. Her heart was beating with terror, but the flute played on. She stood on a rock by the shore and there she left her garments, entered the water and began to swim.

In the darkness she could see no land, having only Tūtānekai’s flute to guide her, and led by that sweet sound she arrived at last to the island.

At the place where she landed, she found a hot pool and went in to warm herself, for she was trembling with cold.

And all went well after that. I find it bizarre that a group of students wanted to test whether this was true, when what they were really testing whether it was possible. 

Click below to read:

Bolding is mine, and the excerpts from the article are indented:

A group of Rotorua children have used science to prove whether the basis of the legendary love story of Hinemoa and Tūtānekai is true.

They concluded it very well could be.

Te Arawa Lakes Trust’s Te Tūkohu Ngāwhā Mātauranga Māori Science and Design Fair is in its third year.

It aimed to celebrate the intersection of Mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) and science, and give students a platform to showcase innovative projects and designs.

There were 35 exhibits in its first year. Last year grew to about 40, and this year more than 100.

Topics covered five categories and ranged from projects focusing on water quality and rongoā (traditional Māori medicines) to investigating a legendary love story.

The latter involved a group from Te Rangihakahaka Centre for Science and Technology looking at the legend of star-crossed lovers Hinemoa and Tūtānekai.

[Rongoā involves not only herbal medicines, but prayer and massage.]

Note that the intent was to prove whether a legend was true, though this language could have been from the reporter and not the students. But the aim of the project was surely to find whether a Māori legend might actually be based on fact:

 

The story, told in the song Pokarekare Ana, is about how beautiful chief’s daughter, Hinemoa, fell in love with lower-ranked suitor, Tūtānekai, and swam across Lake Rotorua to be with him on Mokoia Island when she heard his flute calling to her.

The students decided to test whether she would have been able to hear the sound of his flute from across the water.

The group looked at how various conditions impacted on how loud the flute would have been and how it would have gotten louder as Hinemoa swam across Lake Rotorua.

With transmission loss expected between 30-40 decibels, it would have been soft at first: “a sound like wind in the trees”.

Conditions needed to be calm. No wind; glassy water; cold; overcast and no ripples.

Conclusion: “it would be audible”.

This, of course, depends on how loudly Tūtānekai was playing and whether conditions were right (which of course we cannot know), but I suppose if he was playing to attract his lady love, it would have been loud. (I saw the famous island when I was in Rotorua.)

But the problem with this is that it melds legend with science and, by so doing, mistakes the question “is the story not ruled out by analysis of sound?” with the question that science would ask: “what is the evidence that the story is true?”  And since the story is based solely on a legend transmitted orally and then written down by a European in a book on Polynesian mythology, it has low credibility from the outset.  There are of course dozens of such stories that could be analyzed to see if  bits of them are ruled out by what we know of physical reality, but saying that “they’re not” is not the same as “proving” them. In other words, the Bayesian priors for the truth of this myth were low at the outset, and the probability that this really happened is not substantially increased by analysis of flute sounds.

Further, there are dozens of Māori legends that could not have been true, like the claim that their Polynesian ancestors discovered Antarctica in the seventh century, and in a canoe made of human bones. (This claim is still being advanced by a group of Māori academics.) Maybe there should be a science-fair project seeing if a canoe made of human bones could even float!

There’s a bit more:

Te Arawa Lakes Trust environment officer Keeley Grantham said categories were broad, which meant there was an “amazing array” of projects.

. . .“We’re not just looking at Western science, we’re looking at mitigating environmental issues through a whole heap of different lenses, especially through our te ao Māori lens.

“And enabling kids to broaden their scope of knowledge and just really build upon what they already know and just continue networking and sharing their kaupapa with other tamariki and other people that work in this field.”

About 16 kura (schools) were involved and “at least” 250 children. Groups and individuals could take part.

We have the usual mischaracterization of science as “Western” (science is now worldwide), as opposed to another way of knowing:  “looking at things through our “te ao Māori lens.”  A translation of “te ao Māori“:

Te Ao Māori encompasses the holistic worldview of the Māori people, reflecting an interconnected relationship between the natural world, people, and spirituality. The values embedded within Te Ao Māori offer a framework that aligns seamlessly with collectivist ideals, fostering a sense of unity and shared purpose.

 Whoops, there’s some spirituality in there, as well as values. That is one problem with regarding MM as a “way of knowing”, as the empirical knowledge in it is inextricably bound up with legend, religion, ideology, ethics, and superstition. And this mixture of legend and empirical observation is precisely why the student project is misguided. For surely it was designed to give credibility to Māori legends and to MM.  Were I the teacher, I would have guided students away from projects like this, which simply misleads them about the nature of scientific investigation.

With this kind of stuff encouraged by teachers, is it any wonder that science in New Zealand is circling the drain? Trying to comport it with indigenous legend is simply going to confuse people and, perhaps, drive them out of going into what the article calls “Western” science.

**********

Translation of the other terms above, taken from the Māori dictionary (note that they’re presented in an English-language newspaper without explanation, and I’m guessing very few readers understand them):

kaupapa:  topic, policy, matter for discussion, plan, purpose, scheme, proposal, agenda, subject, programme, theme, issue, initiative.

tamariki:  children – normally used only in the plural.

 

Researchers have identified hexagonal perovskite-related oxides as materials with exceptionally high proton conductivity and thermal stability. Their unique crystal structure and large number of oxygen vacancies enable full hydration and high proton diffusion, making these materials ideal candidates as electrolytes for next-generation protonic ceramic fuel cells that can operate at intermediate temperatures without degradation.

Immobilizing small synthetic molecules inside protein crystals proves to be a promising avenue for studying intermediate compounds formed during chemical reactions, scientists report. By integrating this method with time-resolved serial femtosecond crystallography, they successfully visualized reaction dynamics and rapid structural changes occurring within reaction centers immobilized inside protein crystals. This innovative strategy holds significant potential for the intelligent design of drugs, catalysts, and functional materials.

Today’s photos come from UC Davis math professor Abigail Thompson, a recognized “Hero of Intellectual Freedom” (see here). Her captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.

I included a couple pictures of the pools themselves this time, with lots of anemones, Anthopleura xanthogrammica (giant green anemone) and Anthopleura elegantissima (aggregating anemone) and ochre sea star (Pisaster ochraceus), ostrich plume hydroids and sponges (the bright orange/red stuff):

Family Sabellidae (Feather duster worm). Marine worms are fantastic creatures, but narrowing it down even to the genus can be tricky.  The body of the worm is in the cylindrical tube that ends in sand grains.  The feathery orange tentacles bring food into the worm’s mouth.  The pink is a bit of anemone in the foreground:

Triopha catalinae (clown dorid). One of the most spectacular nudibranchs in California:

Triopha maculata (spotted dorid):

Halosydna johnsoni (maybe….) (scale worm):

Granulina margaritula (pear marginella).  This tiny snail (about the size of a sesame seed) brings its flamboyant mantle (the beautiful speckly brown stuff around the edge) up over its shell:

Anthopleura artemisia (moonglow anemone).  This type of anemone has very variable coloring- the next picture is the same species:

Anthopleura artemisia (moonglow anemone) #2:

Aeolidia loui (warty shag-rug nudibranch).  A good argument for using scientific rather than common names; this nudibranch is quite lovely:

Camera info: Olympus TG-7, mostly in microscope mode, with pictures being taken from above the water.

After a tiring spring that followed the publication of the book, I’ve taken a little break. But starting tomorrow, I’ll be posting on the blog again, focusing again on the important differences between the conventional notion of “particle” and the concept of “wavicle”. I prefer the latter to the former when referring to electrons, quarks and other elementary objects.

Today, though, some book-related news.

First, a book review of sorts — or at least, a brief but strong informal endorsement — appeared in the New York Times, courtesy of the linguist, author and columnist John McWhorter. Since McWhorter is not a scientist himself, I’m especially delighted that he liked the book and found it largely comprehensible! The review was in a paragraph-long addendum to a longer column about language; here’s an excerpt:

I have come across another book that teaches us new ways of looking at things. It taught me that matter consists of the accumulation not of bits of stuff but of standing vibrations. . .  Matt Strassler’s marvelous new “Waves in an Impossible Sea.” . . . makes it possible to understand such things without expertise in physics or math.

Another positive review recently appeared in Nautilus magazine, written by Ash Jogalekar, a scientist himself — but a chemist rather than a physicist. The full review is available here.

Lastly, the audiobook is in preparation, though I still don’t know the time frame yet.

Anytime astronomers talk of mapping the Milky Way I am always reminded how tricky the study of the Universe can be. After all, we live inside the Milky Way and working out what it looks like or mapping it from the inside is not the easiest of missions. It’s one thing to map the visible matter but mapping the dark matter is even harder. Challenges aside, a team of astronomers think they have managed to map the dark matter halo surrounding our Galaxy using Cepheid Variable stars and data from Gaia. 

If we study the nearby universe, we find that almost one-third of all disk galaxies seem to have a warp shape to their disk. Instead of resembling a perfect disk, they somewhat resemble a potato chip or crisp depending on your geographical location. Not surprisingly it is known as a disk warp and even our own Galaxy has one too. Galaxies rotate just like a spinning top and the galactic disk experiences precession or a wobble due to the torque forces from the surrounding dark matter halo. Measuring this has been a challenge for many years.

Credit and Copyright: Stefan Payne-Wardenaar; Magellanic Clouds: Robert Gendler/ESO

Dark matter is a mysterious and invisible type of matter that is thought to make up about 27% of the universe’s mass-energy content. Unlike ordinary matter, dark matter does not emit, absorb, or reflect light, making it detectable only through its gravitational effects. Its presence is inferred from the rotation speeds of galaxies, gravitational lensing, and the cosmic microwave background. Despite lots of research, the exact nature of dark matter is still unknown, and it is one of the most significant unsolved problems in physics and cosmology. It is thought that this invisible matter surrounds most galaxies. 

The international scientific journal Nature Astronomy recently published the paper “A slightly oblate dark matter halo revealed by a retrograde precessing Galactic disk warp.” This research, jointly led by the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Peking University, the National Astronomical Observatory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, introduced an innovative “motion picture” method to measure the precession rate of the Milky Way’s disk warp. 

On either side of the white line in the picture are two models of how dark matter is distributed in a galaxy similar to the Milky Way. At left, non-interacting cold dark matter creates satellite galaxies. At right, dark matter interacting with other particles makes the number of observed satellite galaxies smaller. Credit: Durham University

Central to the study was a type of star known as a cepheid variable. They are a type of pulsating star whose brightness varies in a regular cycle due to periodic expansions and contractions in their outer layers. They are useful because their pulsation period is directly related to their actual or intrinsic brightness so can be used for measuring distances in space. By comparing the apparent brightness of a Cepheid with its known luminosity, we can determine its distance from Earth. 

The team were able to analyse a sample of 2,600 Cepheid variable stars of different ages to observe the precession direction and rate of the Milky Way’s warp. These measurements showed that the current dark matter halo of the Milky Way is slightly oblate – like a sphere that has been squashed at the poles and is rotating backward at 0.12 degrees every million years!

Source : “Motion Picture” Method Reveals the Shape of the Milky Way’s Dark Matter Halo

The post Mapping the Milky Way’s Dark Matter Halo appeared first on Universe Today.

If either of the two presumptive nominees for the major political parties in the US are elected in November they will be the oldest person ever to be inaugerated as president. What implications does this have? As a neurologist who sees patients every workday of various ages, evaluates them, and explicitly investigates the effects of aging on their function, I have some thoughts.

The first thing to realize is that aging affects different people differently. Especially once people get north of 40 you start to see significant and growing divergence in how well people age, in terms of their health and various aspects of functioning. I have seen many patients in their 90s who are completely sharp and fully functional or have just specific issues to deal with, but are overall healthy. I have also seen patients in their 50s who are wrecked and suffering from various aspects of declining health.

This divergence is partly due to the luck of genetics, and partly due to lifestyle. Some people have a chronic illness that dramatically affects their aging. Others may have suffered an injury with long term effects that get more challenging with age. While others have engaged in one or more poor lifestyle choices and have paid a heavy toll. Chronic alcohol use disorder, for example, can be devastating, adding years or decades to one’s apparent age. Smoking also takes its toll.

For these reasons, what we can say about a person based upon just a number is actually quite limited. We can make statistical comments, but that’s all. Even there, we can only describe what is typical, but there are exceptions. There are, for example, so-called “super agers” who do not develop the typical brain changes that most people do with age.

What is average and typical is that as people age they tend to slow down, cognitively and physically. Colloquially the cognitive effects of aging are often referred to as
“senior moments”. What are they, exactly? As we age it is typical for memory access to become more slow. It takes longer to think of a word or a name. However, in healthy aging people will still get there eventually, it just takes longer. On the plus side, as we age we tend to get more thoughtful and complex in our deliberations, so there is actually a trade-off. I heard one researcher describe this as – we develop increasingly more complex algorithms of thought. These take more time, but produce more nuanced and sophisticated outcomes.  We also tend to become more emotionally regulated, less anxious, and have greater life satisfaction.

Also, quite clearly, even the best super-agers, become less resilient.  This is happening on every level, from a cellular level to tissue, organs, and the entire organism. We are less able to deal with stress, and bounce back more slowly. We “pay the price” much more heavily, for a lost night of sleep, any bit of excess, strenuous activity, or even minor ailments like a cold.  We have less biological reserve and our repair mechanisms operate more slowly. This is why one of the most common reasons for ER visits among older women is a urinary tract infection (UTI). When younger a UTI presents likely as some burning urination. When older it can present as delirium. Any physician can also tell you that you have to be more gentle with medications as people get older. They feel the side effects much more extremely.

There is also the frequent challenge of distinguishing healthy aging from pathology. This is an extremely common presentation, for both physical and cognitive complaints. This can be an athlete in their 50s who are losing some ground on performance, or now get significant muscle cramping or some other symptom with extreme activity. It can also be someone in their 60s or 70s who have the typical list of cognitive complaints and are worried it is the beginning of something. That’s my job – to figure out if the presentation is just healthy aging, a functional problem (like getting poor sleep, a medication side effect, or perhaps the effects of anxiety or depression), or if it is symptoms of brain disease. It’s usually not difficult to determine, as by the time someone is sitting in front of me, if they do have organic brain disease, it is detectable.

But still, there are lots of very early or subtle cases, and in any case the patient’s symptoms and concerns have to be addressed. So we typically do a standard workup, especially looking for things that can be treated (like low B12 levels). We then treat whatever we find, go over lifestyle advice, and in some cases treat symptomatically. For those who have signs of organic disease, they go down a different clinical pathway depending on the diagnosis.

How do we apply all of this to the two main presidential candidates? That’s tricky, and it is not my intention to do that here. I will refrain from making armchair diagnoses based upon publicly available video (and so should you). I will say that both candidates have displayed reasons for concern, at least enough to warrant a professional evaluation. That is what I would recommend, and would love to see – a transparent independent full medical, neurological, and cognitive assessment of both (or all) candidates.

I would argue that the American public deserves this information, for all candidates (otherwise it is arguably discriminating based on age).  But I also acknowledge that, especially if not done properly, this can be highly problematic. The results can easily be “weaponized” and taken out of context. There is also a tendency for people to overly rely on numbers, and we wouldn’t want the presidential race to devolve into an IQ pissing contest. A narrative summary by a panel of acknowledged independent experts who were given access to an agreed- upon minimum assessment plus whatever they thought was necessary, and let the chips fall where they may. I doubt this will happen, unless voters insist upon this and get it passed into law. Similarly, I would like to see regulations forcing candidates to fully disclose their financial information.

In any case, this can be a healthy conversation for our society to have in general. We have an aging population. We are dealing with issues of aging in many contexts. It is possible for people to remain functional and productive into extreme old age. We also need to be thoughtful in how we deal with those who are perhaps no longer able to function well enough – when do we take the car keys away? It’s always a difficult conversation. None of us likes to confront the realities of aging. But we have to.

The post Some Thoughts on Aging first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

Tests on lab-grown “mini-brains” show a one-off gene therapy treatment can prevent the formation of the tau tangles associated with several neurodegenerative conditions

I must confess, I think asteroids and I think of movies like Deep Impact or Armageddon! Scientists think that an asteroid like the ones that appeared in the Hollywood blockbusters struck Mexico 66 million years ago and led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. It now seems they may not have been the only ones that were wiped from our planet. Ammonites are marine mollusks that flourished for 350 million years but they were wiped out too. Some research suggests they were struggling in North America but thriving in other parts of the world. 

Ammonites lived during the Mesozoic era and are related to modern day squids and octopuses. They had coiled spiral shells that were divided into chambers which were used to regulate buoyancy and their movement through the sea. Their fossil remains have been found across the planet on beaches up and down coast lines. The shells somewhat resemble the Fibonacci sequence (where consecutive numbers are added to produce the next; 0 and 1 becomes 1, then 2, 3, 5, 8 and so on) and it is this in part that has fascinated palaeontologists about the creature. 

Along with the dinosaurs, the ammonites were wiped from Earth 66 million years ago when a massive asteroid struck the Earth near what we now call the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico creating the stunning feature; the Chicxulub crater. It’s not just the dinosaurs and ammonites that are thought to have been taken to extinction but a total of 75% of all species are thought to have vanished from Earth in the cataclysmic event. It is thought the asteroid that struck Earth was 10 kilometres in diameter and released energy equivalent to billions of atomic bombs. 

Chicxulub crater in Mexico. Credit: Wikipedia/NASA

Palaeontologists have argued that the ammonites were already declining and that their extinction was unavoidable around the end of the Cretaceous period but new research published in Nature Communications shows that they may not have been so close to extinction after all. The paper by lead author Dr Joseph Flannery-Sutherland and team from Bristol University reveal that the evolution of the ammonites ahead of the asteroid impact was really quite complex. 

Using fossils alone to unravel the way a species like ammonites changed over time is difficult. According to Dr Flannery-Sutherland ‘The fossil record tells us some of the story, but it is often an unreliable narrator. Patterns of diversity can just reflect patterns of sampling, essentially where and when we have found new fossil species, rather than actual biological history.’ He goes on to explain that by analysing just the late cretaceous ammonite fossil record as though it was the full story is why the wrong conclusion has previously been drawn. It is more complex. 

The team created a new database of all fossils collected to date, using museum collections, university samples and any specimens available rather than just rely on previously published papers. This helped the team to build a more complete picture from source data. 

The database allowed the team to understand how ammonite extinction rates and speciation rates (how quickly a species gives rise to new species) varied across the world. If extinction was underway during the late cretaceous period then extinction rates would be greater than their speciation rates everywhere. Instead, across a wide range of geographies, the extinction and speciation rates varied considerably. Possible causes for the variation may have been merely environmental factors like ocean temperatures and sea level to predators and competition among ammonites themselves.

Source : Ammonites’ fate sealed by meteor strike that wiped out dinosaurs

The post Ammonites Were Doing Fine Until the Asteroid Hit appeared first on Universe Today.

Moving large amounts of regolith is a requirement for any long-term mission to the Moon or Mars. But so far, humanity has only sent systems capable of moving small amounts of soil at a time – primarily for sample collection. Sending a large, dedicated excavator to perform such work might be cost-prohibitive due to its weight, so why not send a bulldozer attachment to a mobility unit already planned for use on the surface? That was the thought process of an interdisciplinary team of engineers from NASA and the Colorado School of Mines. They came up with the Lunar Attachment Node for Construction and Excavation – or LANCE.

LANCE is an attachment to NASA’s Chariot rover prototype, which was originally designed to be the primary mobility system for astronauts returning to the Moon. However, it was designed in 2007, when the original NASA Lunar Architecture plan was to establish a permanent lunar base in 2019. 

That still has yet to happen, and the Chariot system has recently been replaced by two separate rovers for use in the Artemis missions – one pressurized for longer exploratory trips and one unpressurized for short jaunts around the Artemis base site. However, the concept of LANCE should be adaptable to whatever method NASA finally uses to transport humans on the lunar surface. 

Fraser discusses the architecture plans for Artemis.

While LANCE looks like a simple bulldozer blade, its design is made specifically for use on the lunar surface. Its frame is aluminum rather than steel, a nod to the weight restrictions on space missions. Its curved front end, called a moldboard in excavation terms, is made of a combination of carbon fiber composites and epoxy, which were even more rarely used back in 2009 when the system was initially proposed.

Engineers even produced a prototype after extensive Finite Element Analysis modeling of the expected forces on the blade during several types of actions, such as building roads, landing pads, and berms that could block debris scatter from affecting surrounding equipment during rocket landings and ascents. The prototype was tested at a natural test site in Moses Lake, Washington.

Moses Lake proved an ideal training ground for lunar excavation equipment because of a highly cohesive silt deposited by the Mount St Helens eruption in 1980. The silt proved similar to lunar regolith, but without the requirement to move thousands of tons of simulated regolith to a NASA lab somewhere. So, NASA has been using the site as a test bed for large-scale lunar excavations for years.

Fraser shows plans for the landing and ascent vehicles on the lunar surface.

LANCE performed admirably well during its test phase. It leveled a 25m x 25m area, then moved on to some berm construction. As part of the testing, it quickly became apparent that operator efficiency made a massive difference in how quickly these operations were performed, so whoever ends up using the implement on the lunar surface would benefit from sufficient training beforehand.

But if it ever does end up operational on the Lunar surface, LANCE will have to contend with a very different environment than it did at Moses Lake. Lunar regolith is much more electrostatically charged than volcanic silt, and the lower gravity could make the forces of moving it much more difficult, despite the best modeling efforts of LANCE’s design team. 

It is unclear if LANCE will indeed be part of the Artemis missions, though large-scale excavation equipment will be needed as part of the mission architecture. What will remain to be seen is whether LANCE’s development and testing show that it should be possible to utilize a lightweight, flexible attachment to a rover to help build the infrastructure necessary to support a long-term base on the lunar surface.

Learn More:
Mueller et al. – Lightweight bulldozer attachment for construction and excavation on the lunar surface
UT – NASA Wants to Build Landing Pads on the Moon
UT – What’s the Best Way to Build Landing Pads on the Moon?
UT – Want to Build Structures on the Moon? Just Blast the Regolith With Microwaves

Lead Image:
Chariot rover with LANCE attachment undergoing testing at the Moses Lake test site.
Credit – Mueller et al.

The post A Handy Attachment Could Make Lunar Construction a Breeze appeared first on Universe Today.

Europe is set to regain its capacity to launch satellites into space when the Ariane 6 rocket finally flies after years of delays

Cars carrying sensors and scanners have been touring UK cities collecting data to help property owners plan carbon-cutting retrofit projects

Access Consciousness claims to show how to improve your mental and physical health by touching 32 Access Bars on your scalp. It's basically phrenology reborn and fused with "energy medicine."

The post Access Consciousness: Phrenology fused with energy medicine first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

I guess I have to give the usual disclaimers here: yes, John Sailer is a conservative, and yes, it’s an op-ed from the Wall Street Journal, whose op-eds are reliably on the Right. But of course where else will you learn things that the MSM won’t tell you? In this case, we learn that the National Institutes of Health, the largest government dispenser of research funds in America, is apparently funding hiring initiatives involving racial preferences. But how can they do that given that such hiring is illegal under Title VII? (And accepting students on the basis of race was recently deep-sixed by the Supreme Court.)

The way around this, according to Sailer’s article, is simply to fund “cluster hires,” which gives an institution a pot of money to hire several faculty at once, in hopes that doing so will bring in underrepresented minorities. Well, that’s fine (it casts a wider net), so long as people aren’t hired on the basis of their ethnicity itself.  But in the case of the National Institutes of Health, cluster-hire funding also requires that candidates proffer diversity statements, which of course allow universities to pick and choose using race, which is easily determined from diversity statements. (The University of Chicago prohibits this explicitly based on the Shils Report: our hires and promotions are to be based solely on research, teaching, contribution to the intellectual community, and university or department service).

Further, beyond the NIH’s end-run around race-based hiring, universities are making their own goals much more explicit, as Sailer found out by using the Freedom of Information Act to see what universities are doing vis-à-vis hiring.

If Sailer is wrong in his quotes and claims, he could be sued, and because he bases them on public records, I seriously doubt that his article is misguided.

Click the headline to read, or find the WSJ piece archived here. 

Here are some excerpts, showing how universities manage to hire based on ethnicity. One of them, to my horror, was Vanderbilt, which, headed by Chicago’s former Provost, has been a model of rationality, honesty, free speech, and adherence to academic and legal standards.

Sailer:

 . . . . there is evidence that many universities have engaged in outright racial preferences under the aegis of DEI. Hundreds of documents that I acquired through public-records requests provide a rare paper trail of universities closely scrutinizing the race of faculty job applicants. The practice not only appears widespread; it is encouraged and funded by the federal government.

At Vanderbilt University Medical Center, a large hiring initiative targets specific racial groups—promising to hire 18 to 20 scientists “who are Black, Latinx, American Indian, and Pacific Islander.” Discussing a related University of New Mexico program, one professor quipped in an email, “I don’t want to hire white men for sure.”

Both initiatives are supported by the National Institutes of Health through its Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation program, or First. The program gives grants for DEI-focused “cluster hiring” at universities and medical schools, promising eventually to spend about a quarter-billion dollars.

A key requirement is that recipient institutions heavily value diversity statements while selecting faculty. The creators of the program reasoned that by heavily weighing commitment to DEI, they could prompt schools to hire more minorities but without direct racial preferences. That’s the rationale behind DEI-focused “cluster hiring,” an increasingly common practice in academia. The documents—which include emails, grant proposals, progress reports and hiring records—suggest that many NIH First grant recipients restrict hiring on the basis of race or “underrepresented” status, violating NIH’s stated policies and possibly civil-rights law.

In grant proposals, several recipients openly state their intention to restrict whom they hire by demographic category. Vanderbilt’s NIH First grant proposal states that it will “focus on the cluster hiring of faculty from minoritized racial and ethnic groups, specifically Black, Latinx, American Indian, and Pacific Islander scientists.” The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and the University of Texas at Dallas jointly proposed hiring 10 scholars “from underrepresented groups,” noting that the NIH First program specifically identifies racial minorities and women as underrepresented.

But if you can’t use race as a criterion for hiring, why are DEI statements required? This still confuses me, for it’s not even a moderately disguised way to engage in the practice. If you go to the NIH First Awards page, you see a list of seven schools given FIRST awards for cluster hiring, and then this statement:

These awardee institutions will build self-reinforcing communities of scientists, through recruitment of cohorts of early-career faculty who are competitive for assistant professor positions and have a demonstrated commitment to inclusive excellence. The institutions are also building efforts to positively impact faculty development, retention, progression, and eventual promotion, as well as develop inclusive environments that are sustainable. Overall, the FIRST cohort awardees, together with the CEC  will work to determine if a systematic approach that integrates multiple evidence-based strategies including the hiring of faculty cohorts with demonstrated commitments to inclusion and diversity will accelerate inclusive excellence, as measured by clearly defined metrics of institutional culture change, diversity, and inclusion.

Unless you fell off the turnip truck, you’ll know that “inclusive” and “diversity” are simply code words for “racial diversity.”  But the code isn’t hard to break. This means that the government is, without explicitly admitting it, in the business of producing equity, which of course is against government regulations. In fact, the NIH affirms this ban (bolding is mine):

At its inception, NIH First was widely understood not to involve racial preferences. In 2020, shortly after the program was announced, Science magazine published an explanation: “Not all of the 120 new hires would need to belong to groups now underrepresented in academic medicine, which include women, black people, Hispanics, Native Americans, and those with disabilities, says Hannah Valantine, NIH’s chief diversity officer. In fact, she told the Council of Councils at its 24 January meeting, any such restriction would be illegal and also run counter to the program’s goal of attracting world-class talent.”

ILLEGAL is the relevant word here. Sailer goes on (again, bolding is mine):

Yet multiple programs have stated their intention to limit hires to those with “underrepresented” status. One job advertisement, for a First role at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine, notes: “Successful candidates will be early stage investigators who are Black, Latinx, or from a disadvantaged background (as defined by NIH).”

And some universities make explicit the fact that they’re hiring based on race. Drexel, one of the seven schools that got a FIRST Award, makes it mandatory to be an underrespresented minority to be hired:

Some grantees even admit such preferences in documents sent to and reviewed by the NIH. A joint proposal from the University of Maryland School of Medicine and the university’s Baltimore County campus states that all scientists hired through the program will meet the NIH’s definition of “underrepresented populations in science.” Drexel University’s program, which focuses on nursing and public health, provides its evaluation rubric in a progress report. Among its four criteria: “Candidate is a member of a group that is underrepresented in health research.”

This raises questions about compliance with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits race discrimination in employment. The First program’s website highlights regulations requiring that federal agencies ensure grant recipients comply with nondiscrimination law. The most basic implication is that universities can’t refuse to hire someone, or prefer one candidate over another, because of race or sex. But emails show that this has been happening.

This also occurs at the University of New Mexico (UNM), which appears to have been slapped on the tuches. Bolding is mine:

At the University of New Mexico, the First leadership team heavily scrutinized the race and sex of applicants. “Just to be sure: what was the ethnicity of Speech and Hearing’s first-choice candidate?” a UNM team member asked in an email.

“She identified as URM in her application, right? I am confused, maybe I am misremembering,” a team member wrote of a different candidate. Another responded, “It looks like she said she was a ‘native New Mexican.’ We checked, and she said she’s white.”

. . . UNM appears to have violated NIH First policy, which states that programs “may not discriminate against any group in the hiring process.” The UNM spokeswoman said in a statement that “the email correspondence among members of the UNM FIRST Leadership Team do [sic] not represent the University of New Mexico’s values nor does it comport with the expectations we have of our faculty” and that “as a result of this unfortunate circumstance,” the university is instituting a required “faculty search training/workshop for all . . . faculty search committee members.”

Hiring of underrepresented minorities is, of course, a form of discrimination—against people considered “white” or “white adjacent” (e.g., Asians).

And this goes on even for non-NIH-funded hires. One place is, as I said, Vanderbilt University, run by our former Provost, Daniel Diermeier. Does he know about this?

At Vanderbilt University Medical Center, a large hiring initiative targets specific racial groups—promising to hire 18 to 20 scientists “who are Black, Latinx, American Indian, and Pacific Islander.” Discussing a related University of New Mexico program, one professor quipped in an email, “I don’t want to hire white men for sure.”

For sure!

I’m pretty sure that Vanderbilt does know about this, because they refused to comment when asked. They do have a FIRST grant proposal in for a cluster hire, and it’s explicitly aimed at hiring those of “minoritized” groups, not including, of course, Asians or Jews (bolding is mine):

In grant proposals, several recipients openly state their intention to restrict whom they hire by demographic category. Vanderbilt’s NIH First grant proposal states that it will “focus on the cluster hiring of faculty from minoritized racial and ethnic groups, specifically Black, Latinx, American Indian, and Pacific Islander scientists.”

. . . Taken as a whole, these documents shed new light on the practice of cluster hiring. They explain why some in academia seem to treat the practice as a form of legal racial quotas. In addition to the responses already noted, representatives of the University of Maryland, UT Dallas and UT Southwestern said that their institutions comply with civil-rights laws and don’t discriminate on the basis of race. Drexel, Northwestern, Mount Sinai and Vanderbilt didn’t reply to inquiries.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m in favor of increasing all kinds of diversity—socioeconomic, ethnic, and viewpoint diversity. The more varied people you have, assuming that they meet quality standards, the more chance you can get an oddball idea that will move science forward. But in science, and particularly in the NIH—whose money goes entirely for health-related research—an increase in diversity is important only insofar as it is associated with an increase in the quality of research produced. You can get both only by widening the net, trying to attract more applicants. And in the end you must, according to law, hire people irregardless of their race, and, as the Shils Report specifies for Chicago, using only criteria associated with merit.

 

A giant salamander—and by “giant” I mean about 2.5-4 meters long—equipped with teeth and wicked fangs was found in Namibia, dated at about 270 million years ago, and just reported in Nature.  Its significance is that it is early, but is considered a “stem” tetrapod, meaning that it has some of the characteristics of modern amphibians, which are tetrapods (four-legged animals that could move around on land).  The authors, according to this CBS News story, suremise that it “was considerably longer than a person, and it probably hung out near the bottom of swamps and lakes”.  It was also an apex predator, meaning that it ate other animals, but there was nothing around that could eat it.

Its was found in an area that, 270 million years ago, was at high latitude, ergo cold and partly glaciated. This beast is the first suggestion that there was a tetrapod fauna in cold-ish climates at that time.

Click below to see the article, or download the pdf here:

The researchers recovered a skull that was about 60 cm (2 feet long), as well as the front part of the postcranial skeleton. The authors don’t give a size estimate, but with a two-foot head it was probably large, and could have been 12 feet long: the longest salamander known yet. (The largest living salamander, the Japanese giant salamander (Andrias japonicus), can attain a length of about 5 feet.  This puppy could have been twice as long.

Two skull fragments were known of this animal before, but it hadn’t been named and there were no remains of the skeleton. The authors named this one Gaiasia jennyae, after the Gai-As formation in which it was found, and also after Jenny Clack (1947-2020), who studied early tetrapods. (This, of course, will anger the pecksniffs who think that animals shouldn’t be named after people, but they can jump in the lake.) It is the only species in the genus Gaiasia.

The sample in the field (from the Supplementary information):

(From paper): B. Reassembling the ex situ type specimen of Gaiasia jennyae (F 1528)– a dorsal up skull with lower jaw and most of the articulated axial skeleton. C. In situ dorsal-up Gaiasia jennyae skull (F 1522) at locality shown in A. panorama. D. Type specimen of Gaiasia jennyae (F 1528) shown in B. after preparation. Note the differential compression of the skull roof. There is no evidence of pre-burial breakage or subaerial weathering. Scale bar =10cm.

Here’s the skull in dorsal (a,b) and ventral (c,d) views, and reconstructions.

From the paper: a,b, Skull in dorsal view. a, Photograph. b, Interpretative drawing. c,d, Skull in ventral view. c, Photograph. d, Interpretative drawing. e, Reconstruction of the articulated specimen in lateral view showing preserved elements of the skeleton. adsym, adsymphysial bone; an, angular; anf, angular fenestra; c1, anterior coronoid; c2, middle coronoid; caf, carotid artery foramen; chf, chordatympanic foramen; d, dentary; ept, ectopterygoid; exo, exoccipital; f, frontal; it, intertemporal; j, jugal; l, lacrimal; mx, maxilla; n, nasal; p, parietal; par, prearticular; pfr, prefrontal; pl, palatine; po, postorbital; pof, postfrontal; pp, postparietal; pospl, postsplenial; psph, parasphenoid; pt, pterygoid; qj, quadratojugal; sa, surangular; spl, splenial; sq, squamosal; st, supratemporal; t, tabular; v, vomer. Scale bars, 50 mm (a,c).

And a reconstruction of the skull and postcranial skeleton they found. Because we don’t have the posterior skeleton, length estimates are guesses.

Here are photos and a reconstruction of the lower jaw. The white circles show the fangs, which are indicated in the upper drawing. There were three on each side, and interlocking fangs on the top mandible as well. It ate by both suction and biting:

(From the paper): e, f. Photographs of the right hemimandible. e, Ventral view of the posterior half. f, Dorsal view of the symphyseal area. adsym, adsymphysial plate; an, angular; anf, angular fenestra; c1, anterior coronoid; c2, middle coronoid; chf, chordatympanic foramen; d, dentary; par, prearticular; pospl, postsplenial; sa, surangular; spl, splenial. Dotted white circles show the position of the symphysial fangs. Scale bar, 50 mm.

. . . and a reconstruction of the front of the animal from the paper. Remember, that fearsome head was about two feet long!

Now this is unlikely to be any kind of ancestor of reptiles, but it’s likely that this is one of several species occurring when tetrapods had already evolved from fish and one of its relatives probably gave rise to modern amphibians, while another gave rise to all modern reptiles (and after followed the evolution of birds and mammals). Its importance is not only the “gee whiz” factor, but also the indication that there was a thriving ecosystem at high latitudes about 270 myr ago. After all, this is an apex predator, and it had to eat something aquatic (fish or, perhaps, other early amphibians).  So if these creatures existed, there must also have been many other animals living at high latitudes at that time.

Today is Sunday, and so we get a batch of bird photos from John Avise.  John’s comments and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Falkland Island Birds 

On my vacation voyage to Antarctica aboard a Quark ship in 2018, our first stop was in the Falkland Islands, before heading on to South Georgia Island and then the Antarctic Peninsula proper.  This week’s post shows several of the birds that I photographed in the Falkland Islands.  In retrospect, it turns out that this first stop on our journey was one of the great highlights of that entire voyage.

Cobb’s Wren (Troglodytes cobbi); endemic to the Falklands:

(I sent this photo to Matthew Cobb, who replied, “My wren, which is mine, is very thin at one end, much, much thicker in the middle, and then thin again at the far end.”)

Correndera Pipit (Anthus correndera):

Dark-faced Ground Tyrant (Muscisaxicola maclovianus):

Gentoo Penguin (Pygoscelis papua):

Grass Wren (Cistothorus platensis):

Magellanic Oystercatcher (Haematopus leucopodus):

Magellanic Penguin (Spheniscus magellanicus):

Magellanic Snipe (Gallinago paraguaiae):

Rockhopper Penguin, Eudyptes chrysocome:

Ruddy-headed Goose (Chloephaga rubidiceps) pair:

Striated Caracara (Phalcobaenus australis):

Upland Goose (Chloephaga picta) pair; the white one is the male:

Black-browed Albatross (Diomedia melanophris):

And at my insistence, John put this one up:

Falkland flightless steamer duck (Tachyeres brachypterus):

It looks like a distant ring with three sparkly jewels, but the Webb telescope’s (JWST) most recent image is really the view of a distant quasar lensed by a nearby elliptical galaxy. The telescope’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) looked at the faint apparition during a study of dark matter and its distribution in the Universe.

We get to see this ghostly vision thanks to the gravitational lensing of the quasar. Such lensing creates one of the great natural telescopes in nature. It uses the gravitational effect of matter to warp space. All matter does this, but bigger conglomerations of it do it more. So, for example, a galaxy cluster and its aggregate stars, planets, gas clouds, black holes—and dark matter—warps space quite a bit. So does an individual galaxy.

When that happens, the path of light from more distant objects around (or through) the lens also gets warped. The lens magnifies the view of those distant objects between us and the lensing mass. So, thanks to gravitational lensing, astronomers often get intriguing views of objects otherwise too dim or far away for detailed study.

A Lensed View of a Distant Quasar

The distant quasar RX J1131-1231 that JWST imaged for this view lies about six billion light-years away from Earth. Astronomers know there’s a supermassive black hole at the galaxy’s heart. It emits high-energy X-rays, which Chandra X-ray Observatory and the XMM-Newton orbiting telescope detected. Hubble Space Telescope has also viewed this eerie-looking object.

This image shows the quasar RX J1131-1231 imaged by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope. JWST’s image is in the infrared. Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ of Michigan/R.C.Reis et al; Optical: NASA/STScI

Those X-rays tell astronomers that something very energetic is happening in the galaxy—that’s why it’s also often called a quasar. The X-ray emissions get produced by a superheated accretion disk and eventually bounce off the inner edge of the disk. Astronomers can take a spectrum of that reflected X-ray emission—but they have to account for the fact that it’s affected by the strong gravitational pull of the black hole. The larger the change in the spectrum, the closer the disk’s inner edge lies to the black hole. In this case, the emissions come from a region that lies only three times the event horizon’s radius. That suggests the black hole is spinning very, very fast—at half the speed of light.

JWST’s mid-infrared observation of the lensed quasar allows astronomers to probe the region around the its heart. They should be able to tease out details of matter distribution in the region, which should help them understand the distribution of dark matter there.

Mapping the Black Hole’s History

The central supermassive black hole at the heart of quasar RX J1131-1231 has its own tale to tell. Those X-ray emissions from its accretion disk provide clues to how fast that black hole grew over time and how it formed. There are a couple of main theories about the growth of black holes. We know that stellar-mass ones come from the deaths of supermassive stars. They explode as supernovae. What’s left collapses and that creates the black hole.

However, the supermassive ones at the hearts of galaxies probably form in one of two ways. They could come from the accumulation of material over a long time during collisions and mergers between galaxies. If that happens, a growing black hole gathers material in a stable disk. If it has a steady diet of new material from the disk, that should lead to a rapidly spinning black hole. On the other hand, if the black hole grows due to many small accretion episodes, its diet would come from random directions and its spin rate would be slower.

So, what’s the story of the bright, supermassive monster at the heart of RX J1131-1231? All the observations to date show a rapidly spinning black hole. That means it likely grew via mergers and collisions. Further observations of its high-energy activity should help astronomers as they probe deeper into the Universe and see objects at earlier and earlier epochs of cosmic time. JWST’s contribution helps them use gravitational lenses to spot these things. At the same time, they get to map the distribution of dark matter that helps the Universe create those natural magnifying glasses.

For More Information

Webb Admires Bejeweled Ring
Distant Quasar RX J1131
RX J1131-1231: Chandra & XMM-Newton Provide Direct Measurement of Distant Black Hole Spin

The post Webb Looks at One of the Best Gravitationally Lensed Quasars Ever Discovered appeared first on Universe Today.