Science

The Chronicle of Higher Education is regarded as the most reputable site for news and opinion about American higher education. Not that you’ll agree with everything in it, but the article below, by William Deresiewicz, an author and critic who taught English at Yale for ten years, seems to me the most accurate and eloquent indictment about where American academia has failed in its mission. (Deresiewicz also wrote Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, an indictment of Ivy League and other “elite” colleges.)

Nearly all the explanations for Trump’s victory over Harris involve in part a rejection of American elitism and wokeness (they’re connected, of course), and to Deresiewicz, the results of the November 5 election not only show that “the politics of the academy have been defeated”, along with “its ideas, its assumptions [and] its policies and practices,” but also that the rejection of Harris is connected with the public’s rejection of woke academia. As I said yesterday, the public’s respect for and confidence in higher education has dropped in recent years, and dropped quite sharply.

Below is figure from a recent Gallup poll.  If you lump together those Americans who have a “great deal of confidence” in higher education with those having “quite a lot of confidence”, the composite percentage dropped from 57% in 2018 to 36% last year. That’s a substantial fall!  And I agree with Deresiewicz’s view that the reason for this fall is connected with the defeat of Kamala Harris. Despite Harris’s conscious decision to look more centrist after her nomination, it was too late: the Democrats had already established themselves as the Party of Wokeness, with the center of gravity of the party, and Biden) having moved towards extreme Leftist “progressivism”:

Click the headline below to read Deresiewicz’s take:

There are some telling data in the second paragraph, and I’ve bolded the part giving evidence that the wokeness pervading the Democratic party and American universities, whose faculty are overwhelmingly Democratic, played a role in the election:

Some data points: A post-election survey from Blueprint, a Democratic polling firm, discovered that, among reasons not to vote for the Democratic presidential nominee, “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues than helping the middle class” ranked third, after only inflation and illegal immigration. Among swing voters, it ranked first. California approved a ballot measure to stiffen penalties for theft and drug crimes by a margin of 69-31. Los Angeles elected a former Republican as district attorney over the progressive incumbent by 61-38. Alameda County, which covers most of the East Bay including Berkeley, recalled its progressive DA by 63-37. Portland, Ore., elected a former businessman as mayor over the leading progressive candidate by 18 points.

“Among swing voters, it ranked first”! They didn’t ask about the view that “sex in humans is a spectrum,” something codified into law by the Biden administration but not mentioned by Harris, but many voters who rejected the Democrats surely knew about this, too.

Here’s Deresiewicz’s view on how the teachings of elite colleges trickled down to the public, who rejected them on November 5:

Over the last 10 years or so, a cultural revolution has been imposed on this country from the top down. Its ideas originated in the academy, and it’s been carried out of the academy by elite-educated activists and journalists and academics. (As has been said, we’re all on campus now.) Its agenda includes decriminalization or nonprosecution of property and drug crimes and, ultimately, the abolition of police and prisons; open borders, effectively if not explicitly; the suppression of speech that is judged to be harmful to disadvantaged groups; “affirmative” care for gender-dysphoric youth (puberty blockers followed by cross-sex hormones followed, in some cases, by mastectomies) and the inclusion of natal males in girls’ and women’s sports; and the replacement of equality by equity — of equal opportunity for individuals by equal outcomes for designated demographic groups — as the goal of social policy.

It insists that the state is evil, that the nuclear family is evil, that something called “whiteness” is evil, that the sex binary, which is core to human biology, is a social construct. It is responsible for the DEI regimes, the training and minders and guidelines, that have blighted American workplaces, including academic ones. It has promulgated an ever-shifting array of rebarbative neologisms whose purpose often seems to be no more than its own enforcement: POC (now BIPOC), AAPI (now AANHPI), LGBTQ (now LGBTQIA2S+), “pregnant people,” “menstruators,” “front hole,” “chest feeding,” and, yes, “Latinx.” It is joyless, vengeful, and tyrannical. It is purist and totalistic. It demands affirmative, continuous, and enthusiastic consent.

People are fed up, and I don’t just mean people who voted for Trump. . . [The author recounts the story a woman, a black graduate of Berkeley, who called into an NPR station on the air, saying that black people were fed up with being called “racists” when they simply opposed Biden’s policy of nearly open borders.]

Deresiewicz explains why academia (and the Left in general] has become more extreme. The leftward and largely unhinged shift has, he says, been spearheaded by “studies” department and other departments “not answerable to reality”. But as I’ve written frequently, science too, is being colonized by the “progressive” ideology that most Americans reject:

How did things get to this pass? And how did the academy, the school and citadel and engine of this revolution, become so desperately out of touch with reality, including the reality of people’s lives outside the liberal elite, their needs and beliefs and experiences? One answer is that academics tend to live inside a bubble. They socialize with other academics; far more than used to be the case, they marry other academics; and, of course, they work with other academics. When groups whose members are broadly similar in outlook are isolated from external influences, two things happen: Their opinions become more homogeneous, and their opinions become more extreme. Which is exactly what’s been taking place in the academy in recent decades. The ratio of liberals to conservatives has soared, and more of those who identify as left identify as far left. And both of those trends are more pronounced in the fields and institutions that are leading the revolution: the humanities, the social sciences exclusive of economics, the “studies” programs and departments, the schools of education and social work, the elite universities, and the liberal-arts colleges.

He calls these fields “intellectually corrupt”, and while that may seem extreme, the corruption is ubiquitous.  Yesterday one of my colleagues in an elite college went to a talk on “fat studies”, a talk sponsored by Gender Studies. The point the speaker made was that being obese was not a cause of morbidity and mortality, and the data supporting that was a claim that fat is “protective” in rats. But fat rats die more often than normal ones, just like humans. And in humans, if you simply Google “obesity and mortality”, you find a gazillion references about how being too fat can cause considerable health problems and death.  But the Fat Studies speaker simply denied this, saying that science is one of the impediments to fat acceptance. The speaker claimed instead that health problems with human obesity are the result of dieting, not being overweight!

This flat denial of reality—a reality everyone knows—in the cause of ideology is one reason for the intellectual corruption of “studies”. While such a thesis advanced before a biology department would meet with derision, I’m not so sure that the inhabitants would also soundly reject the claim that “there are only two sexes in humans.”

Here’s Deresieeticz’s argument about the disconnect between reality and “studies” programs, which he also lumps with “social sciences exclusive of economics” and “the schools of education and social work”:

The reason that these disciplines can drift so far from reality is that they are not answerable to reality. If an engineer miscalculates an equation, the building falls down. But what would accountability to reality even mean in the humanities, given that their findings are never applied? It’s not like there are going to be consequences for saying something stupid about Shakespeare. In the social sciences, and, less often, in the hybrid “studies” fields, findings are applied, but it isn’t clear that there’s much of a feedback loop there either. How many hypotheses in psychology have been abandoned because they led to bad educational policy? How many gender-studies scholars have rethought their suppositions in the face of the calamity of gender youth medicine? The more a field becomes beholden to theory, or Theory, the further it floats away from empirical observation and therefore correction. The enterprise becomes entirely self-referential, words built on words, a kind of intellectual Ponzi scheme.

These disciplines could be answerable to reality, as instantiated by the claims of the Fatness Studies speaker, but when data contradict their ideological underpinnings, they simply deny the data.

This piece is particularly well written, and I’ll add just two more bits to show that. Do read it if you have any interest in academia and the outcome of this month’s election:

[Academics] might further consider that the majority of Black, Latino, and Asian Americans do not share their politics or ideology; that the people who speak for those communities in elite liberal spaces — not only colleges and universities but the media, the arts, the nonprofits — share the politics and points of view not of those communities but of other liberal elites and therefore do not, in the simplest and most important sense, represent them; that progressives have been promulgating policies in the names of those communities that they reject — for Blacks, police defunding and abolition; for Latinos, lax immigration and border enforcement — and that they reject them for good reasons. That identity is not a very useful way of understanding people’s motivations.

. . . Finally, they might consider that to say that certain people “vote against their interests” is not only condescending but wrong. People know what their interests are. They know it much better than you do. Their interests are the same as everybody else’s: public safety, economic security and opportunity, and on top of that a little dignity, a little respect. And while Trump is hardly likely to advance those goals, the 80 percent of the country that lies below the upper middle class is perfectly justified in doubting whether the Democratic Party, and the elites that run and influence it, will do so either, because for decades they have not. Yes, Trump is appalling, evil, criminal. But the worse he is, the worse the liberal elite must be, if so many prefer him to them.

Deresiewicz says that the solution is for academics to “entertain the possibility that they’ve been wrong, about a lot of things, and for a long time,” but considers that this is unlikely compared to academics “staying the course”, which of course means becoming woker and woker. If you’re fighting against this at a university, as many of us are, you know that while there are some hopeful signs, like the decline of DEI (a decline that will become steeper under Trump), there is little to stop the slide towards denial of the truth in the service of ideology. Since one of the purposes of academia is to discover and promulgate the truth, this will ultimately lead to academics becoming a mockery in the public eye. It’s already halfway there.

Swapping classrooms for the woods doesn't appear to improve most children's mental health, but they may still enjoy it

Reperfusion technologies that can reanimate human brains are raising the possibility that death could be a reversible condition, even hours after a cardiac arrest

Getting a mission to the point of officially being accepted for launch is an ordeal. However, even when they aren’t selected for implementation, their ideas, and in some cases, their technologies, can live on in other missions. That was the case for the Oversize Kite-craft for Exploration and AstroNautics in the Outer Solar system (OKEANOS) project, originally planned as a Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) mission. Despite not receiving funding to complete its entire mission, the project team released a paper that details the original plan for the mission, and some of those plans were incorporated into other missions that are still under development.

OKEANOS sought to build on JAXA’s success in returning samples from asteroids to Earth. Its most well-known mission in that regard was Hayabusa-2, which returned samples from the asteroid Ryugu in 2020 and has been the subject of dozens of scientific papers since. Ryugu is a near-earth asteroid, which means its origins in the solar system are dramatically different from those of other asteroids farther out from the Sun, which is where OKEANOS came in.

The original plan for OKEANOS was to launch a sample return mission to one of the Jupiter Trojan asteroids that sit in the Lagrange points in front of and behind Juptier and its orbital path. Scientists believe these asteroids originated outside of Neptune’s orbit in the Kuiper belt but were brought closer to the Sun due to gravitational fluctuations caused by the migration of the gas giant planets. Since they would hold clues to the early solar system, astronomers are interested in their composition, and some space exploration enthusiasts are interested in the materials they hold for in-situ resource utilization purposes. But so far, no missions have visited them yet.

A solar panel, like the one shown in the video, would have been a key component of the OKEANOS missions.
Credit – The Japan Times YouTube Channel

That is about to change, though, with Lucy, a NASA mission that launched in 2021 to visit them. However, Lucy will simply do remote observations and lacks the equipment to sample them directly, let alone return a sample back to Earth. The project team had hoped OKEANOS would do just that.

Several novel technologies would be used to enable OKEANOS’ scientific objectives. One of the most interesting was a combination solar sail and ion drive known as a solar power sail. A solar power sail combines the solar pushing power of a solar sail with flexible photovoltaic solar collectors that can collect a significant amount of energy while deployed in a sail-like configuration. JAXA has also successfully tested a similar system with its IKAROS mission, demonstrating the technology in 2010.

Since solar sails have tiny thrust out near Jupiter, OKEANOS relies entirely on an ion engine and simply deploys its “sails” to deploy the solar panels that collect energy to power the ion drive. But once it reached its destination, it would utilize its second interesting technology—a lander.

Fraser talks about Lucy, the first mission to explore the Trojan asteroids.

The two main asteroid sample return missions – OSIRIS-REx and Hayabusa-2 – directly touched down on the surface of their respective asteroids. However, there have been deployed landers that have at least attempted to land on an asteroid before – Philae, the lander that accompanied ESA’s Rosetta mission, is probably the most famous. But never before has a mission attempted to land a lander, collect a sample, and return it to a “mothership” that would then transport that sample back to Earth. Doing so out at the Trojan asteroids would add a new difficulty level of having significant communications lag time, making it difficult to troubleshoot any problems with the mission.

Given JAXA’s track record, it seemed likely that they could pull off that technical challenge. However, the mission was never fully funded due to a “cost issue,” according to the paper. JAXA selected a project known as LiteBIRD to study the cosmic microwave background as its large-class mission for this decade instead. Despite that, the technical details of some of the instrumentation have been described in other papers, and the project team feels confident that future asteroid sample return missions will adopt at least some of them. We’ll be sure to see more of those in the future as interest grows in understanding the roots of our solar system and how we might utilize the readily available resources on asteroids.

Learn More:
Takao et al. – Sample return system of OKEANOS—the solar power sail for Jupiter Trojan exploration
UT – Lucy Adds Another Asteroid to its Flyby List
UT – Separation Camera Takes Full Images and ‘Movie’ of IKAROS Solar Sail
UT – Tiny Fragments of a 4-Billion Year Old Asteroid Reveal Its History

Lead Image:
Concept images of the OKEANOS mission.
Credit – Takao et al.

The post OKEANOS – A Mission That Would Have Retrurned Samples From the Trojan Asteroids appeared first on Universe Today.

Space-time may not be continuous but instead made up of many discrete bits – and we may be able to see their effects near the edges of unusually bright black holes

NGC 4594 is an unusual galaxy. It was discovered in 1781 by Pierre Méchain, and is striking because of a symmetrical ring of dust that encircles the visible halo of the galaxy. Images taken of the galaxy in 2003 show this dusty ring in detail, where it almost resembles the brim of a large hat. So it’s understandable that NGC 4594 is more commonly known as the Sombrero Galaxy. Now the James Webb Space Telescope has captured an amazingly sharp image of the galaxy, and it’s revealing some interesting surprises.

The famous Sombrero galaxy. The prominent dust lane and halo of stars and globular clusters give this galaxy its name. Credit: NASA/ESA and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Although Hubble’s view of the Sombrero Galaxy is stunning, it is bound by the limits of the optical spectrum. In the Hubble image, the thick dust ring obscures any stars that may be forming within it, and the brilliance of the active black hole at the heart of the galaxy outshines any details at the center of the galaxy. Given what we know about galaxies and star formation, it was thought that the dust ring could hide stellar nurseries where new stars are being born. And the central region of the galaxy likely held a bulge of stars similar to that of other galaxies.

The JWST image reveals a very different story. This particular image was captured by Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), which can peer through much of the galaxy’s dust. It reveals clumps of warm molecular gas within the brim of the galaxy, but surprisingly few young stars. It appears that the dust ring is not a significant source of star formation. The image also unveils the central region of the galaxy. Rather than a halo of stars surrounding the black hole, there is a flat disk. While the central black hole is active, it is a low luminosity galactic nucleus, which is again surprising given that it does produce jets of plasma like more active galactic nuclei.

Overall, the Sombrero Galaxy is much more unusual than we expected, and while these are only the first detailed images from the Webb, they already promise to yield a wealth of data. Future observations will likely focus on the globular clusters of the galaxy. There are about 2,000 globular clusters within the Sombrero Galaxy, which is unusually high for a galaxy of its size. This could help explain why NGC 4594 is so different from other galaxies.

You can find more images of the Sombrero Galaxy on the Webb Space Telescope website.

The post Fantastic New Image of the Sombrero Galaxy From Webb appeared first on Universe Today.

Today we have some lovely people photos, featuring parents and their kids, by reader Joe Routon.  Joe’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

People are my favorite thing to photograph. I like to capture feelings and emotions, and mothers’ and children’s relationships are some of the strongest, most beautiful. Here are a mother and her child in the flower section of a market in Peru:

Here’s my photo of a busker, a street musician, who’s exposing her child to music while earning tips for performing on the street:

Another mother and child in Peru. We were waiting in line at a train station, getting ready to ride to Machu Picchu, when I saw this mother turn to kiss her child:

A tender moment between a father and his son:

Another mother and child in Peru:

In Bagan, Burma (Myanmar), this mother carries her child in a basket:

With lithium in short supply, sodium-ion batteries might offer cheap energy storage with less environmental impact

A new computer model can be used to detect and measure interior oceans on the ice covered moons of Uranus. The model works by analyzing orbital wobbles that would be visible from a passing spacecraft. The research gives engineers and scientists a slide-rule to help them design NASA's upcoming Uranus Orbiter and Probe mission.

When Voyager 2 flew by Uranus and Neptune 40 years ago, astronomers were surprised that it detected no global dipole magnetic fields, like Earth's. The explanation: the ice giants are layered and unmixed, which prevents large scale convection to create a dipole field. But what substances would remain immiscible? A scientist modeled the interiors and found that water-rich and hydrocarbon-rich layers naturally form at extreme pressure and temperature, and they do not mix.

Researchers have clarified the conditions under which large numbers of 'squishy' grains, which can change their shape in response to external forces, transition from acting like a solid to acting like a liquid. Similar transitions occur in many biological processes, including the development of an embryo: cells are 'squishy' biological 'grains' that form solid tissues and sometimes flow to form different organs. Thus, the experimental and theoretical framework elaborated here will help separate the roles of mechanical and biochemical processes, a critical challenge in biology.

Studying the filter-feeding mechanism of mobula rays, engineers developed a new design for industrial cross-flow water filters. Research shows the filter-feeders strike a natural balance between permeability and selectivity that could inform design of water treatment systems.

Countries are meeting in South Korea this week to hash out the final details of a global treaty aimed at eliminating plastic pollution — here's what experts say it needs to include

Astronomers often use the Milky Way as a standard for studying how galaxies form and evolve. Since we’re inside it, astronomers can study it in detail with advanced telescopes. By examining it in different wavelengths, astronomers and astrophysicists can understand its stellar population, its gas dynamics, and its other characteristics in far more detail than distant galaxies.

However, new research that examines 101 of the Milky Way’s kin shows how it differs from them.

One powerful way to understand things is to compare and contrast them with others in their class, a technique we learn in school. Surveys are an effective tool to compare and contrast things, and astronomical surveys have contributed an enormous amount of foundational data towards the effort. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS), and the ESA’s Gaia mission are all prominent examples.

The Satellites Around Galactic Analogs (SAGA) Survey is another, and its third data release features in three new studies. The studies are all based on 101 galaxies similar in mass to the Milky Way, and each study tackles a different aspect of comparing those galaxies to ours.

• The SAGA Survey. III. A Census of 101 Satellite Systems around Milky Way–mass Galaxies
• The SAGA Survey. IV. The Star Formation Properties of 101 Satellite Systems around Milky Way–mass Galaxies
• The SAGA Survey. V. Modeling Satellite Systems around Milky Way–Mass Galaxies with Updated UniverseMachine

Research shows that galaxies form inside gigantic haloes of dark matter, the elusive substance that doesn’t interact with light. 85% of the Universe’s matter is mysterious dark matter, while only 15% is normal or baryonic matter, the type that makes up planets, stars, and galaxies. Though we can’t see these massive haloes, astronomers can observe their effects. Their gravity draws normal together to create galaxies and stars.

Dark matter haloes are part of the Large-Scale Structure of the Universe, the cosmic web of dark matter and galaxy clusters and superclusters that make up the Universe’s backbone. Simulated Image Credit: Ralf Kaehler/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

SAGA is aimed at understanding how dark matter haloes work. It examines low-mass satellite galaxies around galaxies similar in mass to the Milky Way. These satellites can be captured and drawn into the dark matter haloes of larger galaxies. SAGA has found several hundred of these satellite galaxies orbiting 101 Milky Way-mass galaxies.

“The Milky Way has been an incredible physics laboratory, including for the physics of galaxy formation and the physics of dark matter,” said Risa Wechsler, the Humanities and Sciences Professor and professor of physics in the School of Humanities and Sciences. Wechsler is also the co-founder of the SAGA Survey. “But the Milky Way is only one system and may not be typical of how other galaxies formed. That’s why it’s critical to find similar galaxies and compare them.”

The comparison between the Milky Way and the 101 others revealed some significant differences.

“Our results show that we cannot constrain models of galaxy formation just to the Milky Way,” said Wechsler, who is also professor of particle physics and astrophysics at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. “We have to look at that full distribution of similar galaxies across the universe.”

The SAGA Survey’s third data release includes 378 satellites found in 101 MW-mass systems, and the first paper focuses on the satellites. Only a painstaking search was able to uncover them. Four of them belong to the Milky Way, including the well-known Large and Small Magellanic Clouds.

This figure shows how SAGA compares to other efforts to find satellite galaxies. Image Credit: Mao et al. 2024.

“There’s a reason no one ever tried this before,” Wechsler said. “It’s a really ambitious project. We had to use clever techniques to sort those 378 orbiting galaxies from thousands of objects in the background. It’s a real needle-in-the-haystack problem.”

SAGA found that the number of satellites per galaxy ranges from zero to 13. According to the first paper, the mass of the most massive satellite is a strong predictor of the abundance of satellites. “One-third of the SAGA systems contain LMC-mass satellites, and they tend to have more satellites than the MW,” the paper states. The Milky Way is an outlier in this regard, which is one reason it’s atypical.

The second study focuses on star formation in the satellites. The star formation rate (SFR) is an important metric in understanding galaxy evolution. The research shows that star formation is still active in the satellite galaxies, but the closer they are to the host, the slower their SFR. Is it possible that the greater pull of the dark matter halo close to the galaxy is quenching star formation?

“Our results suggest that lower-mass satellites and satellites inside 100 kpc are more efficiently quenched in a Milky Way–like environment, with these processes acting sufficiently slowly to preserve a population of star-forming satellites at all stellar masses and projected radii,” the second paper states.

However, in the Milky Way’s satellites, only the Magellanic Clouds are still forming stars, with radial distance playing a role. “Now we have a puzzle,” Wechsler said. “What in the Milky Way caused these small, lower-mass satellites to have their star formation quenched? Perhaps, unlike a typical host galaxy, the Milky Way has a unique combination of older satellites that have ceased star formation and newer, active ones – the LMC and SMC – that only recently fell into the Milky Way’s dark matter halo.”

This figure from the research shows the SFR (left) and the specific SFR (right) for the satellite galaxies in the study. The specific SFR differs from the SFR in that it’s divided by the total stellar mass of the galaxy. The specific SFR basically tells astronomers how quickly the galaxy is growing relative to its size. It’s used to compare star formation efficiency across different size galaxies. The grey squares the SAGA hosts and the stars are the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. Image Credit: Geha et al. 2024.

This is another reason that our galaxy is atypical.

What about the smaller dark matter haloes around the satellite galaxies? What role do they play?

“To me, the frontier is figuring out what dark matter is doing on scales smaller than the Milky Way, like with the smaller dark matter halos that surround these little satellites,” Wechsler said.

The third paper compares SAGA’s third data release with computer simulations. The authors developed a new model for quenching in galaxies with less-than-or-equal-to 109 solar masses. Their model is constrained by the SAGA data on the 101 galaxies, and the researchers then compared it to isolated field galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

The model successfully reproduced the stellar mass function of the satellites, their average SFRs, and the quenched fractions in the satellites. It also maintained the SFR in more isolated satellite galaxies and observed enhanced quenching in closer satellites.

This figure from the research shows the distribution of stellar mass vs. halo mass, with the grey contours representing 2,500 mock Saga-like hosts. It shows that their model successfully reproduces much of what SAGA found. Image Credit: Wang et al. 2024.

The model needs more testing with observations, and the authors point out that spectroscopic surveys are a logical next step. Those surveys can hopefully answer questions about the role internal feedback plays in the lower-mass satellites, about their mass and gas accretion and the influence dark matter has on them, as well as gas processes specific to the satellites.

“SAGA provides a benchmark to advance our understanding of the universe through the detailed study of satellite galaxies in systems beyond the Milky Way,” Wechsler said. “Although we finished our initial goal of mapping bright satellites in 101 host galaxies, there’s a lot more work to do.”

The post We’re Living in an Abnormal Galaxy appeared first on Universe Today.

Deforestation has remained a significant issue globally, with primary forests contributing to 16 per cent of the total tree cover loss in the last two decades, driven by climate change and intensive human activity. This threatens natural resources, biodiversity, and people's quality of life. To protect forests, scientists have developed Forest 4.0, an intelligent forest data processing model integrating blockchain, Internet of Things (IoT), and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies. The system enables real-time monitoring of forest conditions, sustainable resource accounting, and a more transparent forest governance model.

Researchers have created a novel protein-based gel as a potential ingredient in sustainable and high-performance personal skincare products (PSCPs). This protein-based material, named Q5, could transform the rheological -- or flow-related -- properties of PSCPs, making them more stable under the slightly acidic conditions of human skin. This innovation could also streamline the creation of more eco-friendly skincare products, offering increased efficacy and durability while addressing market demands for ethically sourced ingredients.

Hasaan is a black man who’s fortunate to live in Portland, Oregon. Or perhaps not so fortunate, because he can’t get away from all the woke people populating that town. Here is a short, eight-part series that varies in quality, but does show you, in exaggerated form, some of the “issues” in Portland.  The episodes are short—about 4 minutes each.

From Willamette Week:

In the second episode of Hasaan Hates Portland, a fiendishly satirical web series written and directed by Mischa Webley that premieres on Oct. 3, the titular character (played by first-time actor Hasaan Thomas) steps into a coffee shop, looking for a latte. The baristas, both white and both carrying lobotomized expressions, refuse payment, explaining that it is “reparations happy hour.”

“It’s about acknowledging our privilege,” the female barista explains with increasing intensity. “Our white privilege.”

Incredibly ridiculous, yes, but it’s all based on a real event that happened in 2018 when activist Cameron Whitten solicited donations from white Portlanders that were then doled out to Black residents.

“Obviously we’re taking creative liberties,” Webley says, “but I couldn’t make that up. I’m not a good enough writer to think of that. A lot of this project came from me, Hasaan and other Black and Brown friends sharing our experiences in this crazy place we live in.”

From those conversations, Webley built Hasaan Hates Portland’s short, punchy episodes (each one is an easily digestible three-to-five-minutes long), exploring with acidic wit and bemusement the frustrations and a weirdness of being Black in a majority-white city.

Of the three installments I was able to watch, the first features a situation that will be very familiar to all Portlanders: trying to walk down the block while dodging signature collectors, nonprofit street teams and panhandlers. The third, though, centers on a searing monologue from Old Gold (William Earl Ray), pointing out the hypocrisy of gentrification pushing minorities out of desirable neighborhoods even as they place historical markers about the Black community on the street. “As if we’re part of history already,” Old Gold says. When that character undercuts his authority in a wickedly funny scene that follows (which I won’t spoil here), the effect is as bracing as being hit with a water balloon after giving a commencement address.

Hasaan Hates Portland has been a long-gestating project for Webley. The Portland native has made more than a half-dozen short subjects and a feature (2012′s The Kill Hole, starring a young Chadwick Boseman)—all dramas. This new series, spanning eight episodes, is the filmmaker’s first foray into comedy.

“It really took a lifetime of experience,” Webley says, “and I’ve been trying for a while to make fun of it and satirize it and make it funny. It just seemed like it’s not a perspective that’s out there, especially about Portland. That was the big driving force of making it.”. . .

Have a look at the trailer to see if you want to watch it. But you can watch the whole season 1 (8 episodes) in a bit over half an hour):

Trailer:

Episode 1:

Episode 2:

Episode 3:

Episode 4:

Episode 5:

Episode 6:

Episode 7:

Episode 8:

Most people born before 1968 have antibodies against flu viruses similar to the H5N1 strain circulating today, which might lower their risk of severe illness

A team of researchers has successfully demonstrated nonlinear Compton scattering (NCS) between an ultra-relativistic electron beam and an ultrahigh intensity laser pulse using the 4-Petawatt laser. The innovative approach was the usage of only a laser for electron-photon collisions, in which a multi-PW laser is applied both for particle acceleration and for collision (also called an all-optical setup). This achievement represents a significant milestone in strong field physics, in particular strong field quantum electrodynamics (QED), offering new insights into high-energy electron-photon interactions without the need for a traditional mile-long particle accelerator.

Introducing the innovative 'UniMat' platform utilizing 3D engineered nanofiber membrane.