Science

Physicists have developed a novel approach to maintain special quantum characteristics, even in 3D materials, with potential applications in optical systems and advanced computing.

A quantum 'miracle material' could support magnetic switching, a team of researchers has shown.

A quantum 'miracle material' could support magnetic switching, a team of researchers has shown.

Acting in the right place at the right time is the key to effective medical treatment with minimal side effects. However, this feat remains difficult to achieve. Biologists and chemists have now succeeded in developing a tool that controls the location at which a molecule is activated by a simple pulse of light lasting only a few seconds. Tested on a protein essential for cell division, this system could be applied to other molecules. The potential applications are vast, both in basic research and in improving existing medical treatments, such as those for skin cancer.

In a breakthrough for hydrogen technology, researchers have introduced an innovative electronic fine-tuning approach that enhances the interaction between zinc and ruthenium.

Researchers have tested whether intoxicated people can be reliable witnesses when it comes to identifying a suspect's face after a crime is committed.

The efficiency of wireless charging systems is limited by power loss occurring due to frequency changes in the resonant circuits that enable power transfer. These necessary modulations reduce electromagnetic interference caused by resonant frequencies on other devices. However, conventional strategies for adapting to changing frequencies are inefficient, cost-prohibitive, and impractical. Now, scientists have designed a resonant tuning rectifier that provides a low-cost, efficient solution to stabilize power delivery in wireless power systems.

The efficiency of wireless charging systems is limited by power loss occurring due to frequency changes in the resonant circuits that enable power transfer. These necessary modulations reduce electromagnetic interference caused by resonant frequencies on other devices. However, conventional strategies for adapting to changing frequencies are inefficient, cost-prohibitive, and impractical. Now, scientists have designed a resonant tuning rectifier that provides a low-cost, efficient solution to stabilize power delivery in wireless power systems.

Using AI to produce footage of video games with a consistent world and rules could prove useful to game designers

An analysis of more than 270,000 glaciers worldwide reveals that they have lost around 7 trillion tonnes of ice since 2000, raising sea levels by 2 centimetres

Spreading crushed rocks on fields can absorb CO2 from the air – now chemists have devised a way to turbocharge this process by creating more reactive minerals

Researchers at Microsoft say they have created so-called topological qubits, which would be exceptionally resistant to errors, but their claim has been met with scepticism

The discovery that farming might not have been the catalyst for civilisation means we must completely rethink the timeline of the first complex societies

New research has emerged on the development of a novel membrane distillation system and an adsorbent (a substance that can trap chemicals on its surface) for the removal of hazardous perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). Scientists utilized carbon-based materials to successfully remove PFAS from water. This innovative approach could contribute to sustainable purification technologies in the future.

AI is reshaping workplaces, particularly in retail. Researchers explored how AI service quality impacts retail employees' innovation, job fit, and satisfaction. Findings show when employees perceive AI as reliable and empathetic, they are more likely to engage in innovative behavior. AI's adaptability also plays a crucial role in enhancing service quality. While reliability strongly supports innovation, transparency and responsiveness had less influence than expected. Empathy in AI systems was found to have a significant positive effect on employee innovation, creating a more engaging work environment. The study underscores AI's potential to drive service innovation in retail.

Ballbots are versatile robotic systems with the ability to move around in all directions. This makes it tricky to control their movement. In a recent study, a team has proposed a novel proportional integral derivative controller that, in combination with radial basis function neural network, robustly controls ballbot motion. This technology is expected to find applications in service robots, assistive robots, and delivery robots.

Ballbots are versatile robotic systems with the ability to move around in all directions. This makes it tricky to control their movement. In a recent study, a team has proposed a novel proportional integral derivative controller that, in combination with radial basis function neural network, robustly controls ballbot motion. This technology is expected to find applications in service robots, assistive robots, and delivery robots.

In less than a year, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has completely abandoned its mission, originally conceived

. . . to advance academic freedom and shared governance, to define fundamental professional values and standards for higher education, and to ensure higher education’s contribution to the common good.

Academic freedom is generally understood as the freedom of faculty to research and teach what they want, subject to the requirement that they have to teach their subject and not something else (e.g., no creationism in evolution class), nor engage in irrelevant proselytizing.  “Shared governance” is the making of university rules by groups (usually faculty) rather than constituting rules handed down from on high.  At the University of Chicago, both academic freedom and free speech are connected as two of our several “fundamental principles” installed to ensure an atmosphere of free inquiry without intimidation.

As U. Chicago law professor Tom Ginsburg points out in a Chronicle of Higher Education piece, however, the  AAUP, however, has taken several positions within the last year that are either inimical or orthogonal to academic freedom. To put it frankly, the AAUP has become authoritarian, adhering to “progressive” politics and abandoning those precepts that it once adopted to further academic freedom. The three changes the AAUP has made to this end include these (there are a few other and more minor ones included in the piece):

a.) Abandoned its opposition to academic boycotts

b.) Approved of the use of diversity statements, finding them “compatible with academic freedom”

c.) Averring that institutional neutrality, as embodied in Chicago’s Kalven Report, need not impact academic freedom one way or the other, so one need not adhere to the Kalven principle that the university or parts of it cannot issue ideological, political, or moral statements unless those statements bear directly on the mission of the University.

This is basically abandoning much of what the AAUP was set up to support: academic freedom. These changes are shameful and reprehensible, and all I can guess is that the AAUP, like much of the academic “progressive left,” has gone woke, which means clamping down on freedom of speech and putting in place more authoritarian policies.

You can read the article by clicking on the headline below or find the piece archived here.)

I have written on two of the AAUP’s backsliding before (on boycotts here and on DEI statements here and here), but Ginsburg provides a handy summary of why the AAUP’s actions contradict its mission. In effect, he takes the organization to the woodshed.  I’ll quote him briefly on the three issues discussed above, with Ginsburg’s words indented:

Approving boycotts. (Everyone but the AAUP admits that its tacit approval of boycotts was intended to rubber-stamp the BDS policy of boycotting Israel, including its academics).

The first salvo came last summer, when the committee issued a statement legitimating academic boycotts, reversing a prior position from 2006 that had declared systemic boycotts to be incompatible with academic freedom because they limit the capacity of scholars to collaborate with whomever they choose. That had been a sensible position. But the new iteration of Committee A suggested that academic boycotts were a “legitimate tactic” and were acceptable against colleges that had themselves violated academic freedom. A bitter debate about Israel is the barely veiled subtext. Whatever the proponents of the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions movement say about it being limited to institutions and not individuals, it has led to hundreds of cancellations of collaborations with and invitations to individual Israeli scholars, both Arab and Jewish, at a time when that country’s democracy is in deep trouble. In other words, the AAUP has endorsed a practice that interferes on the ground with the academic freedom of individual scholars — precisely the outcome the prior committee had foreseen — while claiming to be neutral on the specific issue of Israel.

Okaying diversity statements.

Next, in October, the AAUP blessed diversity statements as compatible with academic freedom. Mandatory diversity statements are in fact orthogonal to academic freedom, as they do not concern research or teaching. Faculty are divided on their use: Some view them as providing mechanisms to enhance racial diversity among the faculty without running afoul of the law, while others see them as devices to ensure ideological homogeneity. There is significant concern about their legality. The AAUP affirmatively defends them: “Meaningful DEI faculty work,” the organization says, “should be evaluated as part of the core faculty duties of teaching, research, and professional service.” It is hard to imagine that any college receiving federal funds will be able to sustain this posture over the next month, much less the next four years. No leader should have to fight for an already controversial enterprise, one essentially unrelated to academic freedom, when the academic enterprise is under existential threat.

I am one of those opposed to diversity statements, as I see them as both compelled speech (a violation of the First Amendment) and as forced adherence to a particular ideology, since DEI has various interpretations that people disagree with.  Mandating their use thus violates both institutional neutrality and free speech, as well as Chicago’s 1972 “Shils Report“, which says that hiring and promotion must be based on criteria of merit: merit in research, merit in teaching, merit in contributing to the intellectual climate of the university, and meritorious service on committees that further the university’s mission or public service that has an intellectual or research component.  At the very least, the AAUP should not have said anything about diversity statements save the second sentence in the paragraph above.  DEI statements should not have been defended as compatible with academic freedom, as that’s a debatable proposition. (See Brian Leiter’s post highlighted at the bottom.)

Allowing violations of institutional neutrality.

Now comes a third statement, this one adopted in January: “On Institutional Neutrality.” Committee A unhelpfully declares that institutional neutrality is “neither a necessary condition for academic freedom nor categorically incompatible with it.” The main feature of its analysis is a rejection of the policies of the University of Chicago. But the statement contains several mischaracterizations, including a grave misunderstanding of academic freedom itself.

As I’ve written manyt times, institutional neutrality as embodied in Chicago’s Kalven report is essential in buttressing free speech, for “official” statements of the university or its parts that aren’t connected with the university’s mission will have the effect of chilling speech. What student, newly hired faculty, or professor up for tenure would take issue with a political or moral view made “official” because it came from the University or one’s department?  As Ginsburg notes:

The university’s 1970 Shils Report defines academic freedom, which is a function of disciplinary expertise, as “the freedom of the individual to investigate, publish, and teach in accordance with his intellectual convictions.” The AAUP, conversely, conceives of academic freedom as allowing collective units within the university to adopt, by majoritarian vote, policies and statements on external issues, so long as those statements are arrived at in the name of “properly shared governance.” As even Committee A [of the AAUP] acknowledges, this practice has the obvious ability to intimidate junior members of the department. It certainly disincentivizes inquiry on the issues in question. It also invites capacious claims of expertise. Nothing, of course, prevents groups of scholars from signing collective statements on anything. But departments are not bearers of academic-freedom rights. When departmental power is deployed to establish orthodoxies, it inevitably disincentivizes dissent and undermines individual inquiry.

There’s more, but you can read the article at the link above.  The upshot is that the AAUP has been ideologically captured and can no longer be counted on to buttress academic freedom. As Ginsburg concludes (bolding is mine):

The Kalven Report warns us that higher education should not become a “second-rate political force.” But the AAUP itself has become a third-rate defender of academic freedom against a powerful enemy. Rather than focusing on the academic freedom of the individual scholar, Committee A emphasizes collective academic freedom, which it conflates with “shared governance.” It offers us a vision of higher education in which departments promiscuously opine on politics, diversity screening is imposed in hiring and promotion, and unlimited encampments have the warrant of academic freedom. Let’s see how that works out. In our moment of crisis, we need principled leaders able to navigate the storm — and to defend real academic freedom.

Greg Mayer just pointed out to me that over at his website Leiter Reports, U of C law professor Brian Leiter agrees completely with Ginsburg. Two short excerpts from his post of October 10, 2024:

Oh how the mighty have fallen; Committee A of the AAUP used to be a reliable defender of academic freedom, but since its capture by the enemies of academic freedom, it has been going downhill fast.   The latest absurd statement in defense of “diversity statements” reflects pretty clearly the influence of UC Davis law professor Brian Soucek (a member of Committee A), whose mistaken views we have discussed many times before (see especially).   Let me quote the appropriately scathing comments of Professor Tyler Harper (Bates College) from Twitter:

The AAUP statement insisting that mandatory DEI statements are compatible with academic freedom—and not political litmus tests—is ridiculous. DEI is not a neutral framework dropped from the sky, it’s an ideology about which reasonable people—including people of color—disagree.  I have benefited from and support affirmative action, and there are some things that fall under the rubric of DEI that I agree with. But pretending that DEI is not a political perspective or framework—when only people of one political persuasion support DEI—is a flagrant lie.  Evaluating a professor’s teaching with respect to their adherence to a DEI framework is a clear violation of academic freedom. DEI is not some bland affirmation that diversity is important and all people deserve accessible education. It’s a specific set of ideas.

Professor Harper adds:  “Recent events should have made clear that professors, particularly those of us on the left, must defend academic freedom without compromise, even when we disagree with how others use that freedom. When academic freedom is softened, we are always the ones who end up losing.”

. . . DEI is an extramural social goal, just as much as being pro-America in MAGA-land is.  Committee A is dead.  We are fortunate that both FIRE and the Academic Freedom Alliance are actually still defending academic freedom.   I would encourage all readers to resign their membership in the AAUP.  It’s a disgrace.

I hasten to add that I am NOT a member! And had I been, I would have resigned the second the AAUP issued the it’s-okay-to-boycott-Israel statement.

Dubbed CADRE, a trio of lunar rovers are set to demonstrate an autonomous exploration capability on the Moon.

An exciting Moon mission launching in the next year will perform a first, deploying multiple rovers. These will talk to each other and a remote base station, demonstrating an autonomous exploration capability.

The three Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration (CADRE) rovers were recently packaged and shipped from their home at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Each about the size of a small suitcase, the CADRE rovers will launch from LC-39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a SpaceX Falcon-9 rocket with Intuitive Machines’ IM-3 mission in late 2025 or early 2026. The ultimate destination is the enigmatic Reiner Gamma region in the Oceanus Procellarum (Ocean of Storms) region on the lunar nearside.

Robotic lunar rovers go all the way back to the late Soviet Union’s Lunokod-1 rover on the Luna 17 mission in 1970. CADRE, however, will demonstrate that three rovers can work in unison for lunar exploration. This sort of rover network could come in handy, allowing astronaut controllers to one day explore regions too dangerous to venture into.

A CADRE rover undergoes a vibration test ahead of launch. Credit: NASA/JPL A Robotic Lunar Trio

To this end, the Nova-C lander will lower the solar-powered rovers to the surface shortly after touchdown. Engineers equipped each rover with cameras and ground-penetrating radars for exploration. Controllers expect the rovers to last two weeks (14 days) on the surface, from local sunrise to sunset.

“Our small team worked incredibly hard constructing these robots and putting them to the test,” says Coleman Richdale (NASA-JPL) in a recent press release. “We are all genuinely thrilled to be taking this next step in our journey to the Moon, and we can’t wait to see the lunar surface through CADRE’s eyes.”

This will mark Intuitive Machines’ third delivery to the lunar surface. Part of NASA’s CLPS (Commercial Lunar Payload Services) initiative, The company’s IM-1 mission and Nova-C lander Odysseus made an askew landing at the Malapert A crater early last year. The company will make another attempt with the launch of IM-2 next week on February 26th. The mission will carry NASA’s PRIME-1 (Polar Resources and Ice Mining Experiment) with The Regolith and Ice Drill for Exploring New Terrain (TRIDENT) 1-meter drill. The mission is headed to the Shackleton connecting ridge site in the lunar South Pole region.

A Mars rover twin versus a CADRE rover at JPL’s ‘Mars Yard’. Credit: NASA/JPL

Meanwhile, another CLPS mission, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost will land on the Moon on March 2nd.

The Reiner Gamma landing site is a high priority target for exploration. Astronomers recognize the feature as one of the best known examples of a ‘lunar swirl’. It’s also a known site for localized magnetic anomalies. What causes swirls on the lunar surface isn’t entirely clear. They definitely stand out in stark contrast to the typical pockmarked, cratered surface of the Moon.

The location of the Reiner Gamma landing site on the lunar nearside. Credit: Dave Dickinson (inset: NASA/LRO). What Else is Aboard IM-3?

In addition to CADRE, several other experiments are hitching a rideshare trip to the Moon aboard IM-3. These include Lunar Vertex (LVx), a joint lander-rover also looking to explore the magnetic anomalies of Reiner Gamma, and the Korea Astronomy Space Science Institute (KASI)’s Lunar Space Environment Monitor (LUSEM) which will monitor the near-surface space environment on the Moon. Also on board is a pointing actuator experiment for the European Space Agency’s MoonLIGHT network. This is a precursor to the agency’s Lunar Geophysical Network for laser ranging and pinpoint measurements.

The CADRE Team plus the trio of rovers, headed to the Moon. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The Moon is about to become a busy place. It’ll be exciting to see CADRE and other missions resume lunar exploration in the coming years.

The post CADRE’s Three Adorable Rovers Are Going to the Moon appeared first on Universe Today.

There will be no readers’ wildlife today, I’m sad to say, as we’ve run our of contributions save those of Robert Lang, and I don’t want to publish the remaining nine every day.  I guess this is a sign that everything is falling apart.  So today, as it’s Wednesday, we have Jesus and Mo:

And today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “Math 2,” came with the note, “Another 2007 resurrection today, due to other-work overload. Does anyone remomber this one?”

This is a pretty good one, especially “3 X 1 = 1”: