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In a scientific breakthrough, an international research team has developed a quantum sensor capable of detecting minute magnetic fields at the atomic length scale. This pioneering work realizes a long-held dream of scientists: an MRI-like tool for quantum materials.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is hot right now. Also hot: the data centers that power the technology. And keeping those centers cool requires a tremendous amount of energy. The problem is only going to grow as high-powered AI-based computers and devices become commonplace. That's why researchers are devising a new type of cooling system that promises to dramatically reduce energy demands.

Tackling a long-time mystery, scientists have found that the turbulent movements of air in clouds play a key role in the growth of water droplets and the initiation of rain. The research can improve computer model simulations of weather and climate and ultimately lead to better forecasts.

Machine learning models can reliably inform clinicians about the disability progression of multiple sclerosis, according to a new study published this week in the open-access journal PLOS Digital Health by Edward De Brouwer of KU Leuven, Belgium, and colleagues.

Researchers have developed somersaulting spin qubits for universal quantum logic. This achievement may enable efficient control of large semiconductor qubit arrays. The research group recently published their demonstration of hopping spins and somersaulting spins.

Do I need to explain once more the principle of institutional neutrality in academia, whereby a university is prohibited from making official statements about politics, morality, or ideology in its announcements or on its website—except in rare situations when such statements are made to further the mission of the University? This principle was originally devised at the University of Chicago, codified in 1967 as the Kalven Report.

The reason for the principle is to avoid chilling or impeding free speech (we have a separate Principle of Free Expression) by making people fearful of angering authorities and endangering their own status at a university. If a department’s website opposed Israel’s war on Hamas, for example, such opinion (or its opposite) would have to be removed here, for it has nothing to do with the mission of the University. (Of course, there are always Pecksniffs who, by judicious word-twisting, can make any position seem relevant to the mission of a university. But really, our mission is teaching, doing research, and promulgating debate and searches for truth.)

While our Principles of Free Expression were published in 2015, they’ve already been adopted by 110 schools, which adhere to them in varying degrees. However, the Kalven Principle, published 48 years earlier, has been adopted by only a handful of other schools, including the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Vanderbilt University.  Some other schools are contemplating adopting institutional neutrality, but haven’t seemed to push it through.  I’m not sure why, given that freedom of speech and institutional neutrality are mutually supportive, but I suppose schools (and departments, also included in our Kalven Principles) simply can’t resist weighing in on the issues of the day. In fact, even departments at the University of Chicago sometimes can’t resist making statements that seem to violate Kalven, and the administration polices and adjudicates putative violations.

Now the University of California system, as reported by the L.A. Times, is considering adopting institutional neutrality, too, but has gutted the meaning of that principle by watering it down. Click the link below to read, or, if it’s paywalled, find it archived here

Here’s an excerpt from the July 17 article showing how the UC system’s “neutrality” works:

University of California regents voted Thursday to ban political opinion from main campus homepages, a policy initially rooted in concern about anti-Israel views being construed as official UC opinion.

Political opinions may still be posted on other pages of an academic unit’s website, according to the policy approved at the regents meeting in San Francisco. It will take effect immediately.

The main homepage of a campus department, division or other academic unit will be reserved for news about courses, events, faculty research, mission statements or other general information.

Opinion must be published on other pages specifically labeled as commentary, with a disclaimer that they don’t reflect the entire university or campus. Those who want to post statements on their department websites must follow specific procedures and allow faculty members to weigh in through an anonymous vote.

Regent Jay Sures, vice chairman at United Talent Agency, has pushed for such action for the last few years, previously saying he has been troubled by “abuse” and “misuse” of departmental websites featuring anti-Israel sentiment and other opinions that do not reflect official university views.

After initially proposing a more restrictive policy, Sures said the final draft reflects a better balance between free speech and acknowledging both those who want to make statements and those who oppose them.

“This reflects that we value academic freedom, and it provides a very inclusive environment for the individual departments to put out statements and reflecting minority opinions within those departments,” he said.

Sorry, but I find this deeply misguided.  What purpose is served by institutional neutrality on a departmental or division homepage that is violated if you simply click a link on that page?  After all, in California a department or a division can always weigh in on the war, affirmative action, gun control, politics, and so on, on other pages. Suppose the chairman of a sociology department puts up a post condemning Israel for its conduct of the war against Hamas. Even if it’s labeled as “commentary”, who would be foolish enough to think that this will have no effect on the speech of that department? Grad students, junior faculty, and others who are vulnerable will be inhibited from speaking otherwise, even at faculty meetings or in public. After all, your counterspeech could anger the chair, who could then exact retribution, damage your tenure and promotion, and so on.

There are other venues for expressing your opinions as private individuals: they are called “social media.” Or you can write letters to the editor, publish papers, write books, and so on. There is no need to bawl out your political or ideological views on a university website. (As for chairmen and University presidents and provosts, the line is blurred between their private speech and official unviersity speech, and in my view they’d best keep their views on nonacademic stuff to themselves. This is indeed the case at Chicago).

The best course of action is simply to tell people not to use any parts of university websites opinions other than those very relevant to a university’s or a department’s mission. Let us have none of this mishigass about taking votes or putting up disclaimers. That stuff can still chill speech.

A bit more from the article:

Sean Malloy, a UC Merced associate professor of history and critical race and ethnic studies, asserted that regents were trying to “gag faculty speech” and that the proposed policy reflected efforts to repress the growing movement for Palestinian solidarity across UC campuses.

He noted that regents never tried to intervene in faculty statements on the Black Lives Matter movement after George Floyd’s killing, on climate change or in defense of immigrant students.

“It is only when faculty speech threatened to upset support for Israel and Zionism that the Regents saw fit to enact such a policy,” Malloy said in a statement to The Times. “It must be seen along with the dispatch of police against UC students, faculty and staff, as well as the newly adopted measures aimed against encampments as part of an effort by a group of Regents to hold the UC hostage to their own commitment to Zionism in the midst of a genocide against Palestine.”

No, the purpose of such statements is not to “gag faculty speech”, and should certainly not be to profess commitment to Zionism! The principle is meant, again, to allow faculty and everyone else to speak freely without being nervous about revenge from the university.  You just can’t put your speech on official university web pages.

Now Dr. Malloy is right in saying that if there is such a policy, it has to be applied fairly and uniformly: statements not affecting a university’s mission should all be banned from official websites and statements. You simply can’t allow university members to approve of Black Lives Matter or weigh in on George Floyd on one hand, but then then prevent others from writing about Israel on the other. The fair and just solution is simply to tell people to publish all their personal opinions in other places.  After all, there are plenty of such places! This website is one of them: it’s private and not at all connected to or supported by my university. My opinions are, of course, my own, and not that of my school.

Sadly, the regents of the University of California don’t seem to understand either the meaning or the import of institutional neutrality.

I sent this email to Matthew last night:

Tuesday night I read something about J D. Bernal in Hitchens’s “God is Not Great,” which I was rereading, and I remembered that everybody called Bernal by a nickname that testified to his wisdom.  I turned out the light and unsuccessfully tried to remember it for a while, then fell asleep. “I’ll think of it tonight,” I told myself.

Sure enough, I woke up at about 3 a.m. and the first thing that popped into my mind was “SAGE”. That was, of course, his nickname.  Clearly my cranial neurons had been turning it over while I slept.  And of course this happens to all of us: we can’t think of something and much later it suddenly comes to us.  Clearly the brain was working on it in the interim.

The brain is truly a wondrous organ!

J. D. Bernal was a polymath who pioneered the study of molecular shape using X-ray crystallography. I should add that to me this is evidence for determinism. Seeing that name activated a program in my brain to dig out his nickname (which had been stored there for several decades since I read his biography), and the program kept running while I was sleeping.

I’m sure readers have similar or even weirder stories. (Matthew says that this happens to him all the time when he can’t think of a word for a crossword puzzle, but then it comes to him after he takes a break for a while and goes away.

Well, except for singletons and some videos from Tara Tanaka, this is the very end of the queue. I hope it will be remedied soon.

Today’s photos come from UC Davis ecologist Susan Harrison, whose captions are indented. You can enlarge her pictures by clicking on them.

More from Finland:  mammals and songbirds

Here are yet more pictures from a May trip to Finland and Norway that was previously featured in posts on Arctic seabirds, other Arctic creatures, and birds of the northeastern Finnish forests.

Today’s post begins with mammals….

My first-ever Hedgehog (Erinaceus europaeus), in the half-light of 4:00 am in Oulu:

An unbearably adorable Red Squirrel (Sciurus vulgaris) defending a prize pine cone:

A Mountain Hare (Lepus timidus) in its summertime brown coat, and a far more nervous-looking one still wearing its conspicuous winter white coat; this species is found only in tundra, taiga, and moorlands of northern Eurasia:

A diminutive Roe Deer (Capreolus capreolus), belonging to a genus found only in Eurasia:

A young Eurasian Elk (Alces alces), closely related to our Moose (Alces americanus) rather than to what we call Elk in North America (genus Cervus, which in Europe are called Red Deer):

Next, some colorful songbirds:

Greenfinch (Chloris chloris):

Robin (Erithacus rubecula):

Bullfinch (Pyrrhula pyrrhula):

Siskin (Carduelis spinus):

And finally, some songbirds more remarkable for their elaborate music than for their plumages:

Thrush Nightingale (Luscinia luscinia):

Blyth’s Reed Warbler (Acrocephalus dumetorum):

Wood Warbler (Phylloscopus sibilatrix):

Surveys are always tricky because how you ask a question can have a dramatic impact on how people answer. But it is useful to ask the exact same question over a long period of time, because that can indicate how public attitudes are changing. This is one of the benefits of Gallup, which was founded in 1935 and is dedicated to high quality and representative polls. They have been asking the following question since 1982:

“Which of the following statements comes closest to your views on the origin and development of human beings — 1) Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process, 2) Human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process, 3) God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so?”

It’s an imperfect way to ask these questions – the “less advanced life forms” is not really accurate, and the questions all assume or imply the existence of God. But by asking “which one comes closest” it does capture the essence of this issue. Option 3 is basically young-Earth creationism, option 2 is pure scientific evolution, and option 1 is everything else. From my view as a skeptic and science communicator, the results of this survey are dismal but also encouraging. At the start of the survey in 1982 the numbers were stark: 1 – 38%, 2 – 9%, and 3 – 44% (the rest undecided). Therefore 82% of Americans endorsed some form of creationism, and only 9% were willing to say that life resulted from evolution acting all by itself.

The most recent poll from this perspective is encouraging: 1 – 34%, 2 – 24%, and 3 – 37%. There is still a plurality endorsing young-Earth creationism, but those endorsing scientific evolution is up to 24%. These numbers also track with surveys on religion in the US. The young-Earth creationism figure is about the same as the number of Americans who identify as some kind of evangelical (something between 30 and 39%). Admittedly, this number can be squirrely depending on how you define “evangelical” and ask the question, but broadly defined, the numbers track. The scientific evolution numbers also track with those who answer on surveys that they are religiously unaffiliated, also now in the 20’s.

One way to look at these numbers is that, on this specific issue, science education and communication may be entirely irrelevant. How you answer this question may be entirely due to your religious affiliation. But this can also mean that two thirds of Americans are open to the concept of evolution and could benefit from science communication on this topic. I also find that discussing claims surrounding creationism and evolution is a great way to teach science and critical thinking.

So let me pivot to a brief summary of why, as a scientific question, there is little doubt that life on Earth is the result of organic evolution. What I mean by this is that once life arose on Earth (the origin of life is a distinct but related question), a combination of variation followed by differential survival lead to evolution of living forms over time, including speciation, and resulting in a nestled hierarchy of branching relationships, resulting in all life that we see today on Earth. Variation derives from genetic mutations and recombination, while differential survival results from selective pressures and “survival of the fittest” but also genetic drift and possibly other factors.

Creationists (now using the term to broadly refer to all forms of evolution denial) have attempted to prove that evolution in this way is impossible or cannot work, but all such attempts have completely failed. Evolution does not violate the second law of thermodynamics (because the sun is inputting energy into the biosphere), is capable of generating an increase in information (through gene duplication and mutations), and does not have a problem with “irreducible complexity” (a concept that fundamentally misunderstands how evolution works).

Meanwhile the evidence for evolution is overwhelming, especially for the basic concept that all life is related through a nestled hierarchy of evolutionary relationships. We see this evidence when we look at the pattern of living things and how they are spread throughout the world. It’s not random – there is a reason, for example, that marsupials dominate in Australia. We see this in the fossil record, which extends our observations of anatomical patterns not only in space but time. The fossil record also fills in many gaps in the “tree of life”, revealing transitional species and the pattern of what evolved into what. l

Perhaps most powerful, however, is the molecular evidence. Genes evolved from other genes, and we can see this pattern as well, which nicely overlaps with species relationships. We see the same overlapping pattern when we look at protein structures, and at genetic sequences. We even see this pattern when we look at viral inclusions – bits of viral DNA that get stuck in the genome and get passed down. Species with shared ancestors tend to have shared viral inclusions as well. There is simply no possibility that the molecular patterns we seen in proteins and genes is a coincidence. You also cannot explain these clearly evolutionary patterns away by invoking function – we see these evolutionary patterns even when function is not involved, like in silent mutations and viral inclusions.

There is also evidence from developmental biology, as creatures develop in a pattern that reflects their evolutionary history. Develop does not exactly follow prior evolutionary forms, because there is no reason it should, but the stamp of evolutionary history is still clearly seen. The bones in our inner ear, for example, were previously part of the jaw, and when mammals develop these same bones migrate from the jaw to the inner ear.

Also, many times creationists point to “gaps” in the fossil record, eventually paleontologists find fossils that fill in those gaps. We now have an extensive record of bird and whale evolution, for example – previous favorite examples of creationists.

Most importantly, evolution as a scientific theory has proven to be extremely useful. It makes and has made many predictions about what we will find when we look at fossils and study living things, and these predictions have been remarkably successful. There is also no competing theory that can come close to explaining and making sense of all the evidence.

Creationism does not and cannot do this. If you drill down past all the noise and diversion, what creationists ultimately say about the evidence is that God simply chose to make life that way, for whatever reason – in essence God chose to make life look exactly as if it had naturally evolved. This, of course, is an unfalsifiable claim, which is part of the reason why creationism is not science. What creationists do is present a master class in deception, pseudoscience, and logical fallacies. They really have no choice. They reject for purely ideological reasons one of the most successful and powerful scientific theories that humans have come up with, one that is supported by a mountain of evidence.

 

The post Latest Gallup Creationism Poll first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.