Science

A new theory, that explains how light and matter interact at the quantum level has enabled researchers to define for the first time the precise shape of a single photon.

A new theory, that explains how light and matter interact at the quantum level has enabled researchers to define for the first time the precise shape of a single photon.

It is the computational processing of images that reveals the finest details of a sample placed under all kinds of different light microscopes. Even though this processing has come a long way, there is still room for increasing for example image contrast and resolution. Based on a unique deep learning architecture, a new computational model is faster than traditional models while matching or even surpassing their images' quality.

It is the computational processing of images that reveals the finest details of a sample placed under all kinds of different light microscopes. Even though this processing has come a long way, there is still room for increasing for example image contrast and resolution. Based on a unique deep learning architecture, a new computational model is faster than traditional models while matching or even surpassing their images' quality.

An international team has identified a strategy to improve both the performance and stability for solar cells made out of the 'miracle material' perovskite by mitigating a previously hidden degradation pathway.

An international team has identified a strategy to improve both the performance and stability for solar cells made out of the 'miracle material' perovskite by mitigating a previously hidden degradation pathway.

Researchers have developed a new method of growing organic crystals that can be used for energy-harvesting applications.

Researchers have developed a new method of growing organic crystals that can be used for energy-harvesting applications.

In order to use remote locations to record and assess the behavior of wildlife and environmental conditions, the GAIA Initiative developed an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm that reliably and automatically classifies behaviors of white-backed vultures using animal tag data. As scavengers, vultures always look for the next carcass. With the help of tagged animals and a second AI algorithm, the scientists can now automatically locate carcasses across vast landscapes.

New cathode materials are being developed to further increase the capacity of lithium batteries. Multilayer lithium-rich transition metal oxides (LRTMOs) offer particularly high energy density. However, their capacity decreases with each charging cycle due to structural and chemical changes. Using X-ray methods at BESSY II, teams from several research institutions have now investigated these changes for the first time with highest precision: at the unique X-ray microscope, they were able to observe morphological and structural developments on the nanometer scale and also clarify chemical changes.

Researchers have developed a new crystalline material that can harvest water from fog without any energy input. The design of the novel type of smart crystals, which the researchers named Janus crystals, is inspired by desert plants and animals, which can survive in arid conditions.

Scientists find that most of the microplastics and the 'forever chemicals' known as PFAS cycle through landfills and wastewater treatment plants and end up back in the environment.

When making diagnostic decisions, radiologists and other physicians may rely too much on artificial intelligence (AI) when it points out a specific area of interest in an X-ray, according to a new study.

Researchers have developed a new bio-inspired approach to building complex 3D microfluidic networks by utilizing plant roots and fungal hyphae as molds. The team grew plants and fungi in nanoparticles of silica, then baked out the plants and solidified the glass. What remains is glass with micrometer-sized networks where the roots used to be.

Researchers have created a method that uses artificial intelligence to more accurately predict short-term river discharge using historical data from two hydrometric stations on the Ottawa River along with other weather-based parameters. They built on an existing type of algorithm called group method of data handling, which constructs predictive models by sorting and combining data into groups. The models are computed in different combinations repeatedly until the best and most reliable data combination is identified.

Researchers employ machine learning to more accurately model the boundary layer wind field of tropical cyclones. Conventional approaches to storm forecasting involve large numerical simulations run on supercomputers incorporating mountains of observational data, and they still often result in inaccurate or incomplete predictions. In contrast, the author's machine learning algorithm is equipped with atmospheric physics equations that can produce more accurate results faster and with less data.

Researchers study how Champatis roll and bounce down inclines. The authors released a heap of the seeds down an inclined plane while a camera recorded their descent to analyze their speed and the dynamics of their movement. The grains start to spread out slowly, then decrease quickly as they move downstream, akin to rock avalanches. This research may provide valuable insights into geological flows, including hyperspreading of rock avalanches, and could contribute to resolving challenges in this area.

A reader called my attention to a new quarterly online magazine called Sapir. It’s edited by the NYT writer Bret Stephens, it’s free, and it has a number of intriguing articles (check out this interview with Daniel Diermeier, our former provost and now chancellor of Vanderbilt University). It also offers a free one-year hard-copy subscription here.

The magazine appears to deal largely but not exclusively with matters Jewish (Stephens’s background). Among the secular pieces is a fine new article by Stephens himself that you can access by clicking on the title below. It’s about the demise of liberalism in American universities, including a defense of what Stephens considers true liberalism and a list of obstacles to university reform. It’s short and well worth reading.

Stephens defines true liberalism this way:

By liberalism I do not mean the word in the usual ideological or political sense. I mean it as the habit of open-mindedness, a passion for truth, a disdain for dogma, an aloofness from politics, a fondness for skeptics and gadflies and iconoclasts, a belief in the importance of evidence, logic, and reason, a love of argument rooted in intelligent difference. Above all, a curious, probing, independent spirit. These were the virtues that great universities were supposed to prize, cultivate, and pass along to the students who went through them. It was the experience I had as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago 30-plus years ago, and that older readers probably recall of their own college experience in earlier decades.

And how it’s disappeared from universities:

Except in a few surviving corners, that kind of university is fading, if not altogether gone. In its place is the model of the university as an agent of social change and ostensible betterment. It is the university that encourages students to dwell heavily on their experience of victimization, or their legacy as victimizers, rather than as accountable individuals responsible for their own fate. It is the university that carefully arranges the racial and ethnic composition of its student body in the hopes of shaping a different kind of future elite. It is the university that tries to stamp out ideas or inquiries it considers socially dangerous or morally pernicious, irrespective of considerations of truth. It is the university that ceaselessly valorizes identity, not least when it comes to who does, or doesn’t, get to make certain arguments. It is the university that substitutes the classics of philosophy and literature with mandatory reading lists that skew heavily to the contemporary ideological left. It is the university that makes official statements on some current events (but not on others), or tips its hand by prominently affiliating itself with political activism in scholarly garb. It is the university that attempts to rewrite the English language in search of more “inclusive” vocabulary. It is the university that silently selects an ideologically homogeneous faculty, administration, and graduate-student body. It is the university that finds opportunistic ways to penalize or get rid of professors whose views it dislikes. It is the university that has allowed entire fields of inquiry — gender studies, ethnic studies, critical studies, Middle Eastern studies — to become thoroughly dogmatic and politicized.

A charitable term for this kind of institution might be the relevant university — relevant in the sense of playing a direct role in shaping public and political life.

He calls the new kind of universities the “relevant university” in that their raison d’être is to improve society. But in so doing, they put Social Justice above merit and excellence, a point that we made in our joint paper “In defense of merit iu science” published in The Journal of Controversial Ideas.  The demotion of merit in favor of ideology—something that Scientific American excelled at (see the previous paper)—has a very palpable downside: the lost of public confidence in institutions:

In fact, there are many less political and more productive ways in which universities can credibly establish their relevance to the world around them: by serving as centers for impartial expertise, making pathbreaking discoveries, and educating students with vital skills, not just academically but also with the skills of good citizenship and leadership.

But the latter kind of relevance does not emerge from a deliberate quest for relevance — that is, for being in tune with contemporary fads or beliefs. It emerges from a quest for excellence. And excellence is cultivated, in large part, by a conscious turning away from trying to be relevant, focusing instead on pursuing knowledge for its own sake; upholding high and consistent standards; protecting the integrity of a process irrespective of the result; maintaining a powerful indifference both to the weight of tradition and the pressure exerted by contemporary beliefs. In short, excellence is achieved by dedicating oneself to the ideals and practices of the kind of liberalism that gives free rein to what the educator Abraham Flexner, in the 1930s, called “the roaming and capricious possibilities of the human spirit.”

What does excellence achieve, beyond being a good in itself? Public trust. Ordinary people do not need to have a good understanding of, say, virology to trust that universities are doing a good job of it, especially if advances in the field lead to medicines in the cabinet. Nor does the public need to know the exact formulas by which universities choose their freshman class, so long as they have reason to believe that Yale, Harvard, Princeton and their peers admit only the most brilliant and promising.

But trust is squandered when the public learns that at least some virologists have used their academic authority to make deceitful claims about the likely origins of the Covid-19 pandemic. Trust evaporates when the public learns how the admissions process was being gamed for the sake of achieving race-conscious outcomes that disregard considerations of academic merit, to the striking disadvantage of certain groups. And trust is destroyed when the country sees students from elite universities behaving like Maoist cadres — seizing university property, disrupting campus life, and chanting thought-terminating slogans such as “From the river to the sea.” What those protests have mainly achieved, other than to demoralize or terrify Jewish students, is to advertise the moral bankruptcy and intellectual collapse of our “relevant” universities. Illiberalism always ends up finding its way to antisemitism.

I agree with nearly everything Stephens says, even though he calls himself a political conservative. But he can espouse conservatism in politics all he wants (and he does so judiciously, having voted for Harris) so long as he holds out for classical liberalism as the framework for universities.

At the end of his piece, Stephens lists the obstacles impeding a return to liberal universities, obstacles that include illiberal faculty, a “deeply entrenched DEI bureaucracuy”, a “selective adherence to free expression” (this is what brought down Harvard’s Claudine Gay and Penn’s Liz Magill after the House hearings), students taught to identify themselves as victims, and so on.

You may not hear anything new from this piece, but once in a while it helps to have your inchoate ideas clarified by a clear thinker and writer like Stephens, and then buttressed if, like me, your clearer ideas seem correct.

The vast computational power of the El Capitan supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California will be used to support the US nuclear deterrent

Tiny, solid windows in the shells of heart cockles let in light for the photosynthetic algae inside them – and they could show us how to make better fibre-optic cables