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Researchers have developed a pioneering method to precisely manipulate ultrafast spin waves in antiferromagnetic materials using tailored light pulses.

Researchers have outlined ambitious targets to help deliver a sustainable and net zero plastic economy. The authors argue for a rethinking of the technical, economic, and policy paradigms that have entrenched the status-quo, one of rising carbon emissions and uncontrolled pollution.

Harmful emissions from the industrial sector could be reduced by up to 85% across the world, according to new research. The sector, which includes iron and steel, chemicals, cement, and food and drink, emits around a quarter of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions -- planet-warming gases that result in climate change and extreme weather.

A wrist-worn heart tracker called WHOOP detected changes in activity during pregnancy that may be linked to premature births

Experiments with a replica suggest that a piece of mammoth ivory with carved holes found in a cave in Germany was used by ancient humans to make ropes

The Free Press has a new 20-minute film called “American miseducation”, centered on pro-Palestinian protests on American campuses.  Given the pro-Israeli stand of that site, the tenor of this film is not surprising: its thesis is that aggressive pro-Palestinian demonstrators are not just anti-Zionist, but largely antisemitic, and on some campuses are intimidating and even attacking Jewish students, who have no “safe space” of their own. (The attack on the Cooper Union library, shown in this film, is an example.)

The film is made by Olivia Reingold, a Free Press staff writer whose bona fides are these:

Olivia Reingold co-created and executive produced Matthew Yglesias’s podcast, “Bad Takes.” She got her start in public radio, regularly appearing on NPR for her reporting on indigenous communities in Montana. She previously produced podcasts at POLITICO, where she shaped conversations with world leaders like Jens Stoltenberg.

And this is her intro to the film:

That was one of 14 pro-Palestinian rallies I’ve attended since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7. Like the Rockefeller Christmas tree, the activists behind these events consider innocuous institutions to be their enemies: Memorial Sloan Kettering’s Cancer Center, the American Museum of Natural History, and the U.S. Holocaust Museum.

They insist that their aim is to liberate Palestinians, and that they are not antisemitic. But attend enough of these demonstrations and you’ll start to see the swastikas. Some people have looked me in the eyes and said that Israelis are the new Nazis, the prime minister of Israel is the new Hitler, and Palestinians are the new Jews. Out of the scores of people I’ve spoken to, only two demonstrators told me that Israel has a right to exist.

The word Jew is rarely uttered by these protesters. Instead, people hurl terms like Zionist, settler-colonialist, and occupier. They speak of academic theories like decolonization and intersectionality—concepts many told me they learned at elite institutions like Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania.

I decided to go to the source of these ideas: The American campus, where I spoke to scores of anti-Israel activists and dozens of Jewish college students across the country.

I asked: How did an ideology once restricted to the ivory tower come to inspire masses of Americans chanting on behalf of Hamas and Yemeni Houthis? How did Gen Z, the most educated generation in U.S. history, become sympathetic to terrorism? And, most fundamentally, how did our colleges come to abandon the pursuit of truth in pursuit of something far darker?

The result is The Free Press’s first-ever documentary, American Miseducation.

The questions she asks in her last paragraph aren’t really answered, although Critical Theory seems to be a good solution: the oppressor-narrative combined with some undercover anti-Semitism. But the movie poses its own questions.  Is there really a difference between antisemitism and anti-Zionism?  Should antisemitic or anti-Palestinian speech be deemed hate speech?  Who is being most targeted by campus demonstrations: the pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian students? (I’ve seen both groups claim that they are being oppressed.)  My sympathies have been made clear on this site, but I’ll withhold them for now, for you should just watch this short movie.

After seeing this movie, Malgorzata told me glumly. “The good life for American Jews is coming to an end. . . . they are now more or less in the same situation that German Jews were in after Hitler came to power in 1933.  The antisemitism started slowly, but then grew over time until it became too late escape.”  As to what kind of anti-semitism will grow in America, she said, that cannot be predicted.

Describing ourselves as addicted to our phones is a counterproductive way to frame our overuse of technology, argues Pete Etchells

Feedback remembers the cosmic knowledge of politicians past, as Andrew Griffith, newly appointed as minister of state for science in the UK, mistakes the Sun for Mars

Excitement is growing over hints Earth has vast reserves of carbon-free natural hydrogen that we could extract and burn to power our economies, but it is way too soon to declare it a climate saviour

These gorgeously intricate, centuries-old clocks, highlighting the technical expertise of yesteryear, are on show at the Science Museum in London

This is an epic work from 12 Years a Slave director Steve McQueen that explores how a city and its people react to civil control under Nazi occupation and, 80 years on, lockdown against a deadly disease, says Simon Ings

Leading economist Kaushik Basu's new book argues that we can increase our overall happiness by thinking more clearly

A rare family murder adds piquancy to Brian Klaas's account of "chance, chaos and why everything we do matters"

Within almost every galaxy there is a supermassive black hole. This by itself implies some kind of formative connection between the two. We have also observed how gas and dust within a galaxy can drive the growth of galactic black holes, and how the dynamics of black holes can both drive star formation or hinder it depending on how active a black hole is. But one area where astronomers still have little information is how galaxies and their black holes interacted in the early Universe. Did black holes drive the formation of galaxies, or did early galaxies fuel the growth of black holes? A recent study suggests the two evolved hand in hand.

It’s difficult to observe the complex dynamics of black holes and galaxies in the early cosmos, but one way to study them is to compare the mass of a galactic black hole with the mass of all the stars in its galaxy. This can be expressed as a ratio MBH / M* to see how it varies over time. This means measuring this ratio at ever-increasing redshifts, since the greater the redshift, the younger the galaxy.

For this study, the team looked at 61 galaxies with active galactic nuclei (AGNs) as identified by X-ray observations. The luminosity of the AGNs gives us an idea of the black hole’s mass. They then added JWST observations of these galaxies from the COSMOS-Web and PRIMER surveys. From these, they could get the infrared luminosity of the galaxies, which let them determine their total stellar mass.

The mass ratios of this study (red dots) compared to earlier studies. Credit: Tanaka, et al

The galaxies they observed have redshifts between z = 0.7 and z = 2.5, meaning that the galaxies are seen as they were 6 billion to 11 billion years ago. What they found is that galaxies and their black holes grow hand in hand. As the galaxy increases in mass, so does the black hole. The relationship is very roughly linear, though the ratio favors the black hole slightly at higher redshifts. For you math geeks, the team found the ratio varies as MBH / M* = (1 + z)0.37. This means the black holes grow at a slightly slower rate than the galaxies.

Unfortunately, the uncertainty of this result is rather large. It will take more observations, particularly at the higher redshift end, to pin down the relation more precisely. But in the coming years, astronomers should be able to gather this data. This study shows that galaxies and their black holes grow at similar rates across billions of years. Future studies will help us understand the more subtle connections between them.

Reference: Tanaka, Takumi S., et al. “The MBH-M* relation up to z = 2 through decomposition of COSMOS-Web NIRCam images.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.13742 (2024).

The post Even Early Galaxies Grew Hand-in-Hand With Their Supermassive Black Holes appeared first on Universe Today.

I predicted (or hoped) that with New Zealand’s new Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon of the centrist National Party, New Zealand’s educational system, which was circling the drain, would find its way out. After all, Luxon promised to reform the educational system by emphasizing “teaching the basics.”  (New Zealand performs poorly in math and reading compared to countries of comparable well being.) Most of all, I hoped that Luxon would purge the wokeness of the Kiwi educational system, especially the teaching of indigenous superstitions and “ways of knowing” that seem to be insinuating themselves into science education.

Now I’m not so sure.

Reader Al sent me the tweet below, which was like a (mild) punch in the gut. It comes from the (now protected) account of New Zealand’s Chief Science Advisor, Dame Juliet Gerrard. She was appointed for a three-year term on July 1, 2018, a term that was apparently renewed in 2021 by the woke and now ex-Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. Gerrard’s present term expires on June 30 of this year. I hope Luxon replaces her, as she’s clearly woke and misguided, and a fan of those who sacralize the indigenous people, a tendency that’s warped New Zealand academics.

At any rate, have a look at this tweet:

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UPDATE:  The tweet appears to be from 2019, but recall that Gerrard is still the Chief Science Advisor for New Zealand. It’s not clear to me when Gerrard locked her account. The point remains that the present Science Adviser to the Prime Minister has a view of sex that is misguided, probably because of wokeness. In my view, she should not be the science advisor, but that may be solved in June.

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The PM of New Zealand's Chief Science Advisor @ChiefSciAdVisor has locked her account after tweeting this stupidity… pic.twitter.com/K0x66eTfnP

— Andy (@lecanardnoir) January 31, 2024

The first sentence is okay, the second is crazy, at least regarding “sex”. The third is mixed, for if you go to Wikipedia under Intersex, you see the declaration that sex is not binary, but also that indicators of sex, like genitalia, are pretty close to binary:

Intersex people are individuals born with any of several sex characteristics including chromosome patterns, gonads, or genitals that, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, “do not fit typical binary notions of male or female bodies”.

Sex assignment at birth usually aligns with a child’s anatomical sex and phenotype. The number of births with ambiguous genitals is in the range of 1:4,500–1:2,000 (0.02%–0.05%).[3] Other conditions involve atypical chromosomes, gonads, or hormones.

The best source I know of for the frequency of intersex is that of Leonard Sax, which is also quoted ion the Wikipedia article:

A study published by Leonard Sax reports that this figure includes conditions such as late onset congenital adrenal hyperplasia and XXY/Klinefelter syndrome which most clinicians do not recognize as intersex; Sax states, “if the term intersex is to retain any meaning, the term should be restricted to those conditions in which chromosomal sex is inconsistent with phenotypic sex, or in which the phenotype is not classifiable as either male or female,” stating the prevalence of intersex is about 0.018%. This means that for every 5,500 babies born, one either has sex chromosomes that do not match their appearance, or the appearance is so ambiguous that it is not clear whether the baby is male or female.

In both cases, the number of people considered “intersex” is very low.  But that’s pretty much irrelevant to the discussion of whether sex is a spectrum, for biologists, as we discussed yesterday, use a definition of sex involving gametes: if you have the reproductive apparatus to produce small mobile gametes (even if that apparatus is inactive), you’re a male who makes sperm. If you have the apparatus to produce large immobile gametes (even if you can’t, as if you’re postmenopausal or sterile), you’re a female who makes eggs.  If you don’t fit either of these classes, you’re often (but not invariably) classified as intersex.  The athlete Caster Semenya, for example, has internal undescended testes, designed for making sperm, but other female sex traits, like a vagina.  Biologically I’d call her a male, but wouldn’t quarrel if others want to call her “intersex”.

But the point is that intersex individuals are not members of a third sex, so don’t really affect the sex binary: there remain only two types of gametes. We have males, females, and those unclassifiable, with the latter having frequency of one individual in 5600.

I keep repeating myself on the sex binary, along with others like Richard Dawkins, Carole Hooven, and Colin Wright, but I’ll add that the sex binary humans says nothing about the humanity of intersex individuals or transgender individuals (who usually can be classified as biological sex). With a few exceptions involving things like sports and jails, the legal and moral rights of transgender or intersex individuals are independent how “sex” is defined by biologists, and these individuals should never be denigrated for their desire to transition or for the fact that they have a biological condition that makes them intersex.

Finally, the Science Advisor cites Siouxie Wiles, who you can read about on this site (two posts here), a science communicator and microbiologist who’s done some good things, but also vigorously opposed the Listener letter that argued against teaching indigenous ways of knowing as science.  As for @whaeapower on X, it’s another protected account, so I don’t know what it’s about. It may be a Māori site given that “whae” means “mother or aunt” in that language, and because Dame Gerrard has a Māori koru (fern front) tattoo on her back.

At any rate, I guess Dame Gerrard did protect her tweets, as this is what you find when you look for them:

My point, however, is this: the official Science Advisor to the Prime Minister should not be making erroneous statements about sex, even if those statements are made to give succor to people that are not of conventional gender. That she misunderstands sex does not bode well for science education in New Zealand if Dame Gerrard continues in her position after June 30.

As for whether what looks like a quasi-official “X” account should be protected, well, you can be the judge.

Long-lasting hats, jumpers and watch straps that function as smart devices can be made thanks to a cheap and reliable method of creating conductive fibre that can be woven into fabric

Four-atom molecules glued together by microwaves have broken the record for being the most complicated molecule to reach temperatures just billionths of a degree away from absolute zero

DNA from bones found in a cave in Germany has been identified as from Homo sapiens, showing that our species endured frigid conditions there as they expanded across the continent

Prospectors around the world are scrambling to find reserves of "gold hydrogen", a naturally occurring fuel that burns without producing carbon dioxide. But how much is really out there and how easy is it to tap into?

Officials set up almost 2000 camera traps covering 120,000 square kilometres to estimate the number of snow leopards in India’s mountainous regions