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Even tipped over onto its side, the Odysseus Lunar Lander was able to do some science. Though a broken leg means it's doomed to spend eternity in an awkward position, its solar panels were able to gather some energy. Enough for its radiotelescope to take observations for about 80 minutes.

We are so familiar with our solar system that we often presume it is generally how star systems are built. Four little planets close to the star, four large gas planets farther away, and all with roughly circular orbits. But as we have found ever more exoplanets, we've come to understand just how unusual the solar system is. Large planets often orbit close to their star, small planets are much more common than larger ones, and as a new study shows, orbits aren't always circular.

Here’s the latest news/comedy bit from Bill Maher’s Real Time, this one called “America’s Whore Complex.” It’s about the sudden honoring of sex workers, which I suspect derives from the movie “Anora”, featuring a stripper/prostitute played by Mikey Madison). Maher is discombobulated with the change of the word from “prostitute” to “sex worker,” and observes that the fancier word has become a liberal euphemism.  Maher also notes that 41 American actresses were nominated for Oscars for playing sex workers (they’re all shown in photos).

Maher, however, concludes that the word “sex workers” should revert to the old word “whore”, because the virtue-signaling of the former word does “harm to the cause” by sounding “too benign.” His thesis: that often the job is not voluntary, mentioning Andrew Tate, who’s been accused of forcing women into sex work (Maher criticizes Republicans for remaining silent about those activities because Tate’s a Republican).

It’s not one of his best bits. It’s okay, but I was surprised to learn that there have been over forty Oscar nominations for women playing sex workers/prostitutes/whores.

NASA’s InSight lander recorded surprisingly large quakes that indicate Mars is more seismically active than we first thought. Mysteriously, they only happen during Martian summers

Analysing the aftermath of particle collisions has revealed two new instances of “CP violation”, a process that explains why our universe contains more matter than antimatter

Birds do it, chimps do it, even monarch butterflies do it – and by paying more attention to how animals self-medicate, we can find new treatments for ourselves

Gravitational slingshots are now a common part of space missions where the trajectory of a spacecraft is altered using the gravity of another body. These often bring fabulous opportunities for an extra bit of bonus science such as that demonstrated by ESA’s Hera mission on its way to asteroid Dimorphos. It’s following up on the DART 2022 impact but to get there, it’s used the gravity of Mars. It came within 5,000 km of the red planet and on its way, was able to take a look at Mars’ smaller moon Deimos from its far side.

Supernova explosions are powerful enough to cause mass extinctions if they're close enough. But can we tie supernovae to any of Earth's five mass extinctions? New research shows supernovae could be responsible for the Late Devonian and Late Ordovician mass extinctions.

It’s not so surprising that Auckland University harbors a Māori activist like Eru Kapa-Kingi; what is surprising is that Auckland University has publicized his words and activities, amd they seem proud of them!  For Kapa-Kingi’s goal is apparently to decolonize not just Auckland University (once the best university in New Zealand, now a hotpot of identity politics), but all universities in the country. And he sees academia more as a place to enact activism than to seek the truth.

For Kapa-Kingi already knows the truth, and it’s that universities must be decolonized (I take that to mean that all “Western” influences must be expunged), and they should be run on the principles of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, a pact that has nothing to do with academia.  If you read its three provisions, you’ll see this, but the Treaty (“Te Tiriti”) is now being interpreted by the indigenous people as meaning “Māori should get at least half of everything.” (They constitute 17.8% of New Zealanders.)  This drive for inequity is eventually going to wreck New Zealand academics, driving away those who want to study something other than the Treaty of Waitangi—and to keep away academics who ponder studying in New Zealand.

I used to think there was hope for academics (and politics) in this beautiful country, but the fact that the University of Auckland is publicizing Kapa-Kingi in a long puff piece made me realize that universities are committing academic suicide through identity politics. Yes, the whole country has been ideologically captured by the activist tendency to play on the guilt complexes of those descended from Asians and Europeans.

Click below to read the article from the Auckland Uni news site, and if the article disappears you can find it archived here.

Note that the university doesn’t bother to translate most of the Māori language into English. This is its way of virtue signaling, though most Māori (about 79%) do not have a conversational knowledge of their own language. It’s okay to use the language in articles, but the University of Auckland really should translate the Māori terms.

The article’s introduction to Kapa-Kingi:

As the early morning sun cast long shadows over the Far North town of Te Kao, hundreds prepared to embark on a hīkoi that would stretch over nine days, culminating at the steps of Parliament.

Their mission was clear: to challenge the Treaty Principles Bill and uphold the mana of Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

Leading them was Eru Kapa-Kingi, an emerging leader in te ao Māori. At age 28, the law academic and activist ultimately mobilised one of the largest public demonstrations in New Zealand’s recent history. But for Eru, of Ngāpuhi and Te Aupōuri descent, this was more than political activism – it was an act of whakapapa, a reclamation of identity and duty.

“Protecting the tapu, the mana, the integrity of Te Tiriti o Waitangi is something that’s closely aligned with my purpose and my identity,” he says.

“It’s tied to my journey of reclaiming my reo, my connections to who I am, to my iwi, Te Aupōuri and Ngāpuhi. I’ve come to see just where I fit in that puzzle in the matrix of te ao Māori.

“Te Tiriti and He Whakaputanga [the 1835 declaration of independence], and the kōrero that surrounds them, I’m drawn to it on more than an academic level.”

That journey began in the lecture halls of Victoria University where Eru graduated with a conjoint law and arts (te reo Māori) degree with honours, and later continued at Waipapa Taumata Rau. In 2023 he joined Auckland Law School as a professional teaching fellow, where he designs and teaches compulsory courses on te ao Māori me ōna tikanga (the Māori world and its cultural practices).

Yes, the law school at Auckland has compulsory courses on the Māori world and its culture. Compulsory! Do their laws differ from those of New Zealand? I doubt it. There may be cultural adjudications within the various tribes, but if you want a law degree from Auckland, do you really need to learn about Māori culture? Maybe optional courses, but perhaps in sociology or anthropology rather than the law school. But as we’ve seen, throughout New Zealand each major is developing compulsory courses in indigenous culture. It doesn’t matter if you’re a physics or math major, you’ve going to have to take one of these.

At any rate, I’ll give some quotes from the article uttered by Kapa-Kingi, a well-known activist. The quotes are in italics. I’ll also link to the Māori Dictionary since no translations are given:

“Protecting the tapu, the mana, the integrity of Te Tiriti o Waitangi is something that’s closely aligned with my purpose and my identity. . . . “

“It’s tied to my journey of reclaiming my reo, my connections to who I am, to my iwi, Te Aupōuri and Ngāpuhi. [JAC: Tribes from the North Island] I’ve come to see just where I fit in that puzzle in the matrix of te ao Māori.” [JAC: “The Māori world”

During a meeting in Parliament, Kapa-Kingi showed people opposed to a pure Treaty-led government that they were not welcome. (He did an intimidating haka performance):

During the Waitangi Day pōwhiri for Parliamentarians, Eru took a stand. As politicians made their entrance, he led a separate haka. He says it was a direct challenge, that sent an unambiguous message: ‘You are not welcome here’. The act was not symbolic; it was a deliberate response to the voices of the hapū within his iwi, Ngāpuhi, who he says made it clear that certain politicians should not attend, following a year of what they felt were attacks on Māori rights and sovereignty.

The “attack on Māori rights and sovereignty” appears to involve favoring the Treaty Principles Bill, a doomed bill that intended to codify what the Treaty of Waitangi really means today. People don’t want the bill because the “progressives” want to interpret the Treaty in ways that consistently favor the indigenous people. (New Zealand has no constitution.) Even the Prime Minister, who at one point pushed the bill, has realized its antiwoke implications and now says it has no chance of passing.

Finally, the dangers to New Zealand academia, my primary concern:

For Eru, academia is not just a career path but an opportunity for transformation. He sees universities as central to the colonial project in Aotearoa and believes they have a responsibility to undo its damage.

“We need to start realising that universities were one of the primary tools of colonisation in Aotearoa, replacing Māori philosophy, Māori ways of thinking, speaking and acting.”

“That places an obligation on academics today to really contribute to the deeper, longer-term decolonisation project,” he says.

“And it’s not just an academic topic but a lived reality. It should be a daily practice that all people in Aotearoa contribute to.”

And there you have it. Everybody must decolonize!

As the anonymous correspondent who sent me this article said, “This is not what we thought we were agreeing to when we supported affirmative action to increase the proportion of Māori academics, but it’s what we got. This guy is basically using his university position to further the political interests of Te Pāti Māori.” [JAC: the Māori Party].  “It’s not hard to see why people like this oppose institutional neutrality.”

Institutional neutrality, of course, would prevent universities from making pronouncements favoring indigenous people over everyone else, and also confecting mandatory courses that have the same effect. The progressives don’t want that!

The wind on Saturn's largest moon is strong enough to blow around rocks of up to half a metre in diameter, which could put NASA's upcoming Dragonfly mission at risk

Here are some photos from a new contributor, Loretta Michaels. Her IDs and identifications (the binomials are from me) are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

These were taken in Oct/Nov 2024 on the Upper Amazon in Peru, as part of a boat trip around the region. If you wanted to add this to my description, I use a Sony DSC-RX10 M4 (a fantastic camera that for some reason Sony has discontinued, much to the disappointment of fans.)

Tropical Kingbird (Tyrannus melancholicus):

Plum-Throated Cotinga (Cotinga maynana):

Large-billed tern (Phaetusa simplex):

Black Collared Hawk (Busarellus nigricollis):

Squirrel monkey (Saimiri sp.):

Another Black Collared Hawk:

Harpy Eagle (I think; Harpia harpyja):

Black-crowned Night Heron (Nycticorax nycticorax):

Great Black Hawk (Buteogallus urubitinga):

Yellow-rumped cacique (Cacicus cela):

 Oriole Blackbird (Gymnomystax mexicanus):

Roadside Hawk (Rupornis magnirostris):

A pause from my quantum series to announce a new interview on YouTube, this one on the Blackbird Physics channel, hosted by UMichigan graduate student and experimental particle physicist Ibrahim Chahrour. Unlike my recent interview with Alan Alda, which is for a general audience, this one is geared toward physics undergraduate students and graduate students. A lot of the topics are related to my book, but at a somewhat more advanced level. If you’ve had a first-year university physics class, or have done a lot of reading about the subject, give it a shot! Ibrahim asked great questions, and you may find many of the answers intriguing.

Here’s the list of the topics we covered, with timestamps.

• 00:00 Intro
• 00:40 Why did you write “Waves in an Impossible Sea”?
• 03:50 What is mass?
• 09:03 What is Relativistic Mass? Is it a useful concept?
• 17:50 Why Quantum Field Theory (QFT) is necessary
• 23:50 Electromagnetic Field, Photons, and Quantum Electrodynamics (QED)
• 36:17 Particles are ripples in their Fields
• 38:47 Fields with zero-mass particles vs. ones whose particles have mass?
• 46:49 The Standard Model of Particle Physics
• 52:08 What was the motivation/history behind the Higgs field?
• 1:02:05 How the Higgs field works
• 1:05:33 The Higgs field’s “Vacuum Expectation Value”
• 1:12:02 The hierarchy problem
• 1:24:18 The current goals of the Large Hadron Collider

A private moon mission planned for 2027 will be the first step towards commercial lunar mining of rare and expensive helium-3

A recent BBC article reminded me of one of my enduring technology disappointments over the last 40 years – the failure of the educational system to reasonably (let alone fully) leverage multimedia and computer technology to enhance learning. The article is about a symposium in the UK about using AI in the classroom. I am confident there are many ways in which AI can enhance learning efficacy in the classroom, just as I am confident that we collectively will fail to utilize AI anywhere nears its potential. I hope I’m wrong, but it’s hard to shake four decades of consistent disappointment.

What am I referring to? Partly it stems from the fact that in the 1980s and 1990s I had lots of expectations about what future technology would bring. These expectations were born of voraciously reading books, magazines, and articles and watching documentaries about potential future technology, but also from my own user experience. For example, starting in high school I became exposed to computer programs (at first just DOS-based text programs) designed to teach some specific body of knowledge. One program that sticks out walked the user through the nomenclature of chemical reactions. It was a very simple program, but it “gamified” the learning process in a very effective way. By providing immediate feedback, and progressing at the individual pace of the user, the learning curve was extremely steep.

This, I thought to myself, was the future of education. I even wrote my own program in basic designed to teach math skills to elementary schoolers, and tested it on my friend’s kids with good results. It followed the same pattern as the nomenclature program: question-response-feedback. I feel confident that my high school self would be absolutely shocked to learn how little this type of computer-based learning has been incorporated into standard education by 2025.

When my daughters were preschoolers I found every computer game I could that taught colors, letters, numbers, categories, etc., again with good effect. But once they got to school age, the resources were scarce and almost nothing was routinely incorporated into their education. The school’s idea of computer-based learning was taking notes on a laptop. I’m serious. Multimedia was also a joke. The divide between what was possible and what was reality just continued to widen. One of the best aspects of social media, in my opinion, is tutorial videos. You can often find much better learning on YouTube than in a classroom.

I know there are lots of resources out there, and I welcome people to leave examples in the comments, but in my experience none of this is routine, and there is precious little that has been specifically developed to teach the standard curriculum to students in school. I essentially just witnessed my two daughters go through the entire American educational system (my younger daughter is a senior at college). I also experienced it myself in the decades prior to that, and now I experience it as a medical school educator. At no level would I say that we are anywhere close to leveraging the full potential of computers and multi-media learning.  And now it is great that there is a discussion about AI, but why should I feel it will be any different?

To be clear, there have been significant changes, especially at the graduate school level. At Yale over the last 20 years we have transitioned away from giving lectures about topics to giving students access to videos and podcasts, and then following up with workshops. There are also some specific software applications and even simulators that are effective. However, medical school is a trade school designed to teach specific skills. My experience there does not translate to K-12 or even undergraduate education. And even in medical school I feel we are only scratching the surface of the true potential.

What is that potential? Let’s do some thought experiments about what is possible.

First, I think giving live lectures is simply obsolete. People only have about a 20 minute attention span, and the attention of any class is going to vary widely. Also, lecturers have a massive difference in their general lecturing skills and their mastery of any specific topic. Imagine if the entire K-12 core curriculum were accompanied by series of lectures by the best lecturers with high level mastery of the subject material. You can also add production value, like animations and demonstrations. Why have a million teachers replicate that lecture – just give students access to the very best. They can watch it at their own pace, rewind parts they want to hear again, pause when their attention wanes or they need a break. Use class time for discussion and questions.

By the way – this exists – it’s called The Great Courses by the Teaching Company (disclosure – I produced three courses with the Teaching Company). This is geared more toward adult learning with courses generally at a college level. But they show that a single company can mass produce such video lectures, with reasonably high production value.

Some content may work better as audio-only (a Podcast, essentially), which people can listen to when in the car or on the bus, while working out, or engaged in other cognitively-light activity.

Then there are specific skills, like math, reading, many aspects of science, etc. These topics might work best as a video/audio lecture series combined with software designed to gamify the skill and teach it to children at their own pace. Video games are fun and addictive, and they have perfected the technology of progressing the difficulty of the skill of the game at the pace of the user.

What might a typical school day look like with these resources? I imagine that students’ “homework” would consist of watching one or more videos and/or listening to podcasts, followed by a short assessment – a few questions focusing on knowledge they should have gained from watching the video. In addition, students may need to get to a certain level in a learning video game teaching some skill. Perhaps each week they need to progress to the next level. They can do this anytime over the course of a week.

During class time (this will vary by grade level and course) the teachers review the material the students should have already watched. They can review the questions in the assessment, or help students struggling to get to the next level in their training program. All of the assessments and games are online, so the teacher can have access to how every student is doing. Classroom time is also used for physical hands-on projects. There might also be computer time for students to use to get caught up on their computer-based work, with extended hours for students who may lack resources at home.

This kind of approach also helps when we need to close school for whatever reason (snow day, disease outbreak, facility problem, security issue), or when an individual needs to stay home because they are sick. Rather than trying to hold Zoom class (which is massively suboptimal, especially for younger students), students can take the day to consume multi-media lessons and play learning games, while logging proof-of-work for the teachers to review. Students can perhaps schedule individual Zoom time with teachers to go over questions and see if they need help with anything.

The current dominant model of lecture-textbook-homework is simply clunky and obsolete. A fully realized and integrated computer-based multi-media learning experience would be vastly superior. The popularity of YouTube tutorials, podcasts, and video games is evidence of how effective these modalities can be. We also might as well prepare students for a lifetime of learning using these resources. We don’t even really need AI, but targeted use of AI can make the whole experience even better. The same goes for virtual reality – there may be some specific applications where VR has an advantage. And this is just me riffing from my own experience.

The potential here is huge, worth the investment of billions of dollars, and creating a market competition for companies to produce the best products. The education community needs to embrace this enthusiastically, with full knowledge that this will mean reimagining what teachers do day-to-day and that they may need to increase their own skills. The payoff for society, if history is any judge, would be worth the investment.

The post Using AI for Teaching first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

Scientists have long sought the particle that carries the force of gravity, but a new theoretical model tosses out that idea entirely – and shows how it could be tested in experiments

The Big Wheel, discovered using the James Webb Space Telescope, formed just 2 billion years after the big bang - surprisingly early for a spiral galaxy of a similar size to our Milky Way

Surveys that ask thousands of people how they spend their time have revealed some surprising activities that seem to make any given day a good one

Even as quacks and antivaxxers take over our federal government's health apparatus, let's not forget why we need stronger, not laxer, regulation of "unconventional" medical practices.

The post Quackery (still) kills: A five-year-old boy dies in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

When Beetlejuice goes off, it's going to be the show of a lifetime. But it’s not going to hurt us.

Despite their overall similarities, asteroids are usually pretty distinct from one another. Vesta has a very different spectroscopic profile than Psyche, for example. So it might come as no surprise that another of the main asteroids - Pallas - is in a class all its own except for the 300 or so members of its "family" with similar orbital profiles and spectroscopic lines. A new paper from researchers who were then Visiting Astronomers at NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) in Haiwi'i took a look at members of that family in the infrared for the first time and compared them to a particular Near-Earth object that might have a similar make-up.