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You think you know someone, then you see them in a slightly different way and BAM, they surprise you. I’m not talking about other people of course, I’m talking about a fabulous star that has been studied and imaged a gazillion times. Beta Pictoris has been revealed by many telescopes, even Hubble to be home to the most amazing disk. Enter James Webb Space Telescopd and WALLOP, with its increased sensitivty and instrumentation a new, exciting feature emerges. 

Beta Pictoris is the second brightest star in the southern constellation Pictor. It is a very young star, thought to be about 20 million years old and at a distance of just 63 light years, is in our cosmic backyard. Observations in 1984 revealed that Beta Pictoris had the most amazing dust disk out of which planets are forming. The European Southern Observatory has since confimred there are at least two planets (imaginitively called Beta Pictoris b and Beta Pictoris c) orbiting within the dust disk. 

Over the years, Beta Pictoris has been the target for many observations including those from the Hubble Space Telescope that revealed a second, previously unseen disk. The second disk is slightly inclined to the first but further observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have revealed a new structure in this second disk. 

The team, led by Isabel Rebollido from the Astrobiology Center in Spain used the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRI) and the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) of the JWST to explore the disks of Beta Pictoris in more detail.  They were surprised to find a new structure at an angle to the secondary disk that was shaped like a cats tail. Despite the plethora of previous observations including those from the space busting HST, the instruments on JWST are more sensitive and have greater resolution. 

MIRI, ( Mid InfraRed Instrument ), flight instrument for the James Webb Space Telescope, JWST, during ambient temperature alignment testing in RAL Space’s clean rooms at STFC’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, 8th November 2010.

The “Cat’s Tail” was not the only surprise. When the MIRI data was studied, it revealed that the two disks were different temperatures revealing they were composed of different material. The secondary disk and Cat’s Tail were shown to be a higher temperature than the main disk. It’s also easy to deduce they are both made of dark material since they have not been previously observed in visible or near infra-red light but are bright under mid infra-red wavelengths. 

One of the theories to explain the higher temperature is that the material is highly porous, similar perhaps to the material found on comets and asteroids. The nature of the dust is one question that is perhaps easily addressed, something a little more challenging to answer is the nature and origin of the Cat’s Tail. 

The team explored a number of possible hypotheses that could explain the tail’s shape but failed to settle on a satisfactory model. One of their favoured theories is that the tail is the result of an event that occured within the disk around a hundred years ago! The event may have been a collision sending the dust into a trajectory that mirrors that of the impactor but then it starts to spread out to produce a curve. A contributory factor may simply be the angle of the tail from our vantage point causing the angle of the tail to seem steeper than it actualy is. 

One thing is for certain, the recent observations of Beta Pictoris have revealed some surprises of a very well loved and observed object. Further research will help us to gain a more fuller understanding of these new features but it leaves me wondering what other objects that we are familiar with still hold some surprises. 

Source : Webb discovers dusty cat’s tail in Beta Pictoris system

The post Webb Blocks the Star to See a Debris Disk Around Beta Pictoris appeared first on Universe Today.

Greater covid-19 vaccine uptake could have prevented several thousand deaths and hospitalisations in UK during a coronavirus wave in 2022

About 164 light-years away, a Hot Jupiter orbits its star so closely that it takes fewer than four days to complete an orbit. The planet is named WASP-69b, and it’s losing mass into space, stripped away by the star’s powerful energy. The planet’s lost atmosphere forms a trail that extends about 560,000 km (350,000 miles) into space.

Scientists know that stars can strip mass from planets that get too close. It’s called mass loss, and it’s driven by extreme UV (EUV) and/or X-ray energy from a star and by the stellar wind. It’s not a rare phenomenon, even though researchers don’t fully understand it.

But seeing the actual stream of gas coming from the planet is a rare opportunity to study mass loss.

Researchers have known about WASP-69b’s predicament and have predicted how much of the planet’s atmosphere is being stripped away. Previous research even identified a very small, subtle tail. But new research shows that the tail, which would stretch from Earth to well beyond the Moon in our Solar System, is much longer than previously thought.

The new research is titled “WASP-69b’s Escaping Envelope Is Confined to a Tail Extending at Least 7 Rp.” It’s published in The Astrophysical Journal. The first author is Dakotah Tyler, a doctoral student in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at UCLA.

“Work by previous groups showed that this planet was losing some of its atmosphere and suggested a subtle tail or perhaps none at all,” said first author Tyler. “However, we have now definitively detected this tail and shown it to be at least seven times longer than the planet itself.”

As we began to detect more and more exoplanets with NASA’s Kepler mission, followed by the TESS mission, something became apparent. There are gaps in the exoplanet population. The Neptunian Desert refers to the dearth of Neptune-sized planets on two to four-day orbits around their stars. The Small Planet Radius Gap refers to a dearth of exoplanets with radii between 1.5 and 2 times Earth’s radius. Scientists think that mass loss plays a role in both phenomena, and it’s unlikely that there’s a lack of exoplanets that form in the Gap and the Desert.

But the details of atmospheric loss are not well understood. WASP-69b and its extended tail of stripped gas give astronomers a rare opportunity to study it more closely.

“Studying the escaping atmospheres of highly irradiated exoplanets is critical for understanding the physical mechanisms that shape the demographics of close-in planets,” the authors write in their paper.

Previous researchers found the tail, so Tyler and his co-authors knew where to look. But Tyler and the other researchers used a much larger telescope for their observations. They used the 10-meter telescope at the Keck Observatory and its high-resolution spectrograph, NIRSPEC. They found that the stream, which is primarily hydrogen and helium, is much longer than thought.

This figure from the research illustrates some of the findings. In the left panel, T1 through 4 represent observation times with Keck. The orange circle is the star, and the black circle is WASP-69b. The right panel shows what the system would look like from the top down. Image Credit: Tyler et al. 2023.

“Over the last decade, we have learned that the majority of stars host a planet that orbits them closer than Mercury orbits our sun and that the erosion of their atmospheres plays a key role in explaining the types of planets we see today,” said co-author and UCLA professor of physics and astronomy Erik Petigura. “However, for most known exoplanets, we suspect that the period of atmospheric loss concluded long ago. The WASP-69b system is a gem because we have a rare opportunity to study atmospheric mass-loss in real-time and understand the critical physics that shape thousands of other planets.”

There are two different forces at work here. Radiation from the star and the stellar wind. Both forces work together to strip away WASP-69b’s and then shepherd it away. The tail is a direct result of how both of those forces work together.

“These comet-like tails are really valuable because they form when the escaping atmosphere of the planet rams into the stellar wind, which causes the gas to be swept back,” Petigura said. “Observing such an extended tail allows us to study these interactions in great detail.”

Neutral hydrogen is really hard to see, so the researchers measured the Helium in the tail and used it to estimate the overall mass loss from the planet. One of the reasons that previous research found a smaller tail is because the telescope they used is smaller. Larger telescopes gather more photons from whatever they’re observing. The figure below compares the current research, done with a larger telescope, with the previous observations. Both show helium light curves.

This figure from the research shows two nights of observations from CARMENES with four observations from the much larger Keck and its NIRSPEC instrument. Notice that the point-to-point scatter for CARMENES is much larger than with NIRSPEC, which has a higher signal-to-noise ratio. NIRSPEC’s better performance allowed the researchers to measure the helium more accurately. Image Credit: Dakotah et al. 2024

The researchers say that the star is losing about one Earth mass of material every 100 million years. But WASP-69b is a massive gas giant of about 0.29 Jupiter’s mass. This means that it would take an awfully long time to be reduced to nothing.

But it’ll never be reduced to nothing, according to the authors.

“At around 90 times the mass of Earth, WASP-69b has such a large reservoir of material that even losing this enormous amount of mass won’t affect it much over the course of its life. It’s in no danger of losing its entire atmosphere within the star’s lifetime,” Tyler said.

Exoplanets may also stabilize once they’ve been reduced to a specific mass. Some research shows that exoplanets with atmospheres that are double the radius of their core are the most stable and resist atmospheric loss. If the atmosphere is larger than this, then the planet is susceptible to atmospheric erosion and will eventually reach the more stable state outlined above. For planets with smaller atmospheres than this, runaway atmospheric loss is likely.

This figure is from separate research published in 2017. It shows the erosion of atmospheres as a function of time for planet models with a range of initial envelopes. Low-mass envelopes are stripped clean, while higher-mass ones are herded toward a stable state. Image Credit: Owen and Wu, 2017.

This new research is based on fairly brief observations. The authors point out that there’s likely more variability in the system that changes the mass loss rate over time. Understanding the variability is critical to understanding the mass loss in more detail.

“Repeat observations are valuable to probe any variability in the outflow properties, especially with different instruments,” they conclude.

The post A Hot Jupiter With a Comet-Like Tail appeared first on Universe Today.

The day when human beings finally set foot on Mars is rapidly approaching. Right now, NASA, the China National Space Agency (CNSA), and SpaceX have all announced plans to send astronauts to the Red Planet “by 2040”, “in 2033”, and “before 2030”, respectively. These missions will lead to the creation of long-term habitats that will enable return missions and scientific research that will investigate everything from the geological evolution of Mars to the possible existence of past (or even present) life. The opportunities this will create are mirrored only by the challenges they will entail.

One of the greatest challenges is ensuring that crews have access to water, which means that any habitats must be established near an underground source. Similarly, scientists anticipate that if there is still life on Mars today, it will likely exist in “briny patches” beneath the surface. A possible solution is to incorporate a system for large-scale water mining operations on Mars that could screen for lifeforms. The proposal, known as an Agnostic Life Finding (ALF) system, was one of thirteen concepts selected by NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concept (NIAC) program this year for Phase I development.

The concept was proposed by Steven Benner and a team from the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution (FfAME) in Alachua, Florida. Benner is a former professor of chemistry at Harvard University, ETH Zurich, and the University of Florida, where he was the V.T. & Louise Jackson Distinguished Professor of Chemistry. In 2005, he founded the Foundation For Applied Molecular Evolution, where he and his colleagues became the first scientists to synthesize a gene, thus giving birth to the field of synthetic biology.

As Benner and his team explained in their proposal, the ALF system is designed to simplify astrobiological studies on Mars before any crewed missions arrive. Its purpose is also to address several foregone conclusions raised at NASA’s 2019 Conference (Extant Life on Mars: What’s Next?) held in Carlsbad, New Mexico. During this conference, it was generally agreed that scientists have good reason to suspect the following about life on Mars:

• Life started on Mars using the same geo-organic chemistry that started life on Earth.
• Martian life persists today on Mars, in near-surface ice, low elevations, and caves, all with transient liquid brines, environments that today on Earth host microbial life.
• Martian life must use informational polymers (like DNA); Darwinian evolution requires these, and Darwinian evolution is the only way matter can organize to give life.
• While Martian “DNA” may differ (possibly radically) in its chemistry from Terran DNA, the “Polyelectrolyte Theory of the Gene” limits the universe of possible alien DNA structures.
• Those structures ensure that Martian DNA can be concentrated from Martian water, even if very highly diluted, and even if Martian “DNA” differs from Earth DNA.
• On Mars, as it exists today, information polymers cannot be generated without life (unlike other less reliable biosignatures such as methane), ensuring that life will not be “detected” if it is not present (the “false positive problem”).

Citing a previous study by SETI Institute senior scientist John D. Rummel and NASA Planetary Protection Officer (PPO) Catherine A. Conley, Benner and his team note that there are several fallacies when it comes to proposed efforts to search for extant evidence of Martian life. Addressing the planetary protection policy of the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR), Rummel and Conley concluded that there are four significant “shortcomings in their plans to look for evidence of life on Mars.” First, they addressed the contention that appropriate levels of spacecraft cleanliness are unaffordable.

Second, they challenged claims that there are major risks in assuming life could be identified through nucleic acid sequence comparison, especially if those sequences are obtained from a “Special Region” contaminated with Earth life. They also challenge the contention that present-day exploration by “dirty robots” is preferable to the possibility of contamination spread by future human exploration and that the potential effects of contaminating resources and environments essential to future human missions to Mars were not being addressed. Based on these considerations, Rummel and Conley concluded that scientists did not consider the detection of extant life on Mars “a high priority.”

Graphic depiction of the Agnostic Life System (ALF) to screen for introduced and alien life. Credit: Steven Benner

According to Benner and his colleagues, the purpose of this NIAC project is to change this view before the arrival of crewed missions, which will undoubtedly complicate the search for indigenous Martian life. Therefore, the plans for crewed missions in the coming decades place a very strict deadline on the search or life on Mars, but also offer an opportunity that can be exploited. In particular, Benner and his team indicate how mission proposals emphasize the need for in-situ resource utilization (ISRU), especially where near-surface water ice is concerned. As they wrote:

“Propellant (methane and oxygen) will be generated from that water and atmospheric carbon dioxide for the return trip back to Earth. That water ice will be mined on the scale of tens to hundreds of tons. Further, to maximize the likelihood of safe return of the crew to Earth, robotic operations that mine tons of near-surface water ice will be in place before the first human astronauts arrive. Thus, water mined in preparation for human arrival is correctly seen as an extremely large-scale astrobiological sample, far larger than dry cached rocks.”

The mined water ice, they claim, will contain dust deposited over time by Martian dust storms, allowing scientists to obtain information about the accessible surface of Mars. Therefore, the massive sample of water ice will enable a highly sensitive survey of the Martian surface for potential signs of life. The ALF system will allow for the extraction of genetic polymers – be they alien or the result of contamination from robotic missions. The ALF system also offers tools to conduct partial in-situ analysis of any polymers that dissociate in water (polyelectrolytes).

According to Benner, the system is called “agnostic” because of how it “exploits what synthetic biology taught us about the limited kinds of Darwinian genetic molecules.” Since it is an add-on system, including an ALF system represents a negligible burden in terms of mass and energy to any existing mining operation. Despite that, it will allow for science operations that will establish a strict lower limit on the amount of biomaterial that is accessible on the Martian surface and will do so before a human presence is established on Mars.

As Benner and his team summarized, the system will also be useful on other bodies humanity hopes to explore for signs of life (and possibly settle) someday. “[I]t will do so before Homo sapiens becomes a multiplanetary species. And “multiplanetary” is the correct term,” they wrote. “This add-on ALF system can be used on all celestial bodies where water will be mined to search for and analyze life, indigenous or introduced, Earth-like or alien. This includes Europa, Enceladus, the Moon, and exotic locales on Earth.”

Further Reading: NASA

The post NASA Selects New Technology to Help Search for Life on Mars appeared first on Universe Today.

The latest coronavirus variant, JN.1, is more infectious, but seems to be causing less severe illness than in previous waves

One of the central factors in the evolution of galaxies is the rate at which stars form. Some galaxies are in a period of active star formation, while others have very little new stars. Very broadly, it’s thought that younger galaxies enter a period of rapid star formation before leveling off to become a mature galaxy. But a new study finds some interesting things about just when and why stars form.

The study looked at a type of galactic cluster known as Brightest Cluster Galaxies (BCGs), which are the largest and brightest galaxy clusters we can see. In this case, the team identified the 95 brightest clusters as seen from the South Pole Telescope (SPT). These galaxies are at redshifts ranging from z = 0.3 to z = 1.7, which spans the period of the Universe from 3.5 to 10 billion years ago.

That’s a good chunk of cosmic time, so you would think the data would show how star formation changed over time. At a high rate when galaxies were young and there was plenty of gas and dust around, then at a low rate after much of that raw material had been consumed. But what the team found was that within these clusters star formation was remarkably consistent across billions of years. They also found the key to when star formation occurs: entropy.

Entropy is a subtle and often misunderstood concept in physics. It is often described as the level of disorder in a system, where the entropy of a broken cup is higher than that of an unbroken cup. Since entropy always increases, you never see a cup spontaneously unbreak itself. But in reality, entropy can describe a range of things, from the flow of heat to the information required to describe a system.

A sample of galaxy clusters, with X-ray light seen in purple. Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/MIT/M. Calzadilla el al.; Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. Wolk & J. Major

One of the things to keep in mind is that within a region of space, the entropy can decrease, as other areas increase. The most common example is your refrigerator. The interior of your fridge can be much cooler than the rest of your kitchen because electrical power pumps heat away from it. The same is true for life on Earth. Living things have a relatively low entropy, which is possible thanks to the energy we get from the Sun. A similar effect can occur within galaxy clusters. As gas and dust collapses on itself thanks to gravity, the entropy within can decrease. The material becomes denser and cooler over time, and thus stars can begin to form.

At first glance, this seems obvious. Of course stars can form when there is plenty of cool gas and dust around. That’s how it works. But what the team found is that there isn’t a specific temperature or density at which stars form. These factors play off each other in various ways, but the key is the overall entropy. Once the entropy within the cluster drops below a critical level, stars begin to form. They found that this critical level can be reached across billions of years, which is why star formation in all these clusters is so remarkably stable.

It’s an important result because it shows that rather than finding just how much gas and dust there is within a galaxy, or whether it’s at a sufficiently cool temperature, we only need to quantify the entropy of a galaxy. And when that entropy is just right, new stars will shine.

Reference: Calzadilla, Michael S., et al. “The SPT-Chandra BCG Spectroscopic Survey I: Evolution of the Entropy Threshold for Cooling and Feedback in Galaxy Clusters Over the Last 10 Gyr.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2311.00396 (2023).

The post Gigantic Galaxy Clusters Found Just Before They're Awash in Star Formation appeared first on Universe Today.

The multiverse may be a cool (and convenient) concept for comic books and superhero movies, but why do scientists take it seriously?

In a new book titled “The Allure of the Multiverse,” physicist Paul Halpern traces why many theorists have come to believe that longstanding scientific puzzles can be solved only if they allow for the existence of other universes outside our own — even if they have no firm evidence for such realms.

It’s easy to confuse the hypotheses with the hype, but Halpern says there’s a huge difference between the multiverse that physicists propose and the mystical realm that’s portrayed in movies like “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.”

“Some people accuse scientists of trying to delve into science fiction if they even mention the multiverse,” Halpern says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast. “But the type of science that people are doing when they talk about the multiverse is real science. It’s far-reaching science, but it’s real science. Scientists are not saying, ‘Hey, maybe we can meet another Spider-Man and attack Kingpin that way.'”

On one level, the concept of a multiverse — encompassing the paths that the universe takes as well as the roads not taken — addresses our instinct to wonder “what if” (which happens to be the title of a Marvel multiverse comic-book series). For example, what if Marty McFly’s mother missed out on meeting his father in “Back to the Future”?

“This whole idea of ‘which world is better, which world is worse’ — this is something people think about a lot, and inspires notions like the multiverse, where you imagine what would have happened if the universe developed differently, what would have happened if history was different,” Halpern says. “It’s a very popular question for us, and could well stem from our survival instincts in terms of planning.”

Multiplicity of multiverse motivations “The Allure of the Multiverse: Extra Dimensions, Other Worlds and Parallel Universes,” by Paul Halpern. (Basic Books)

For physicists, however, the multiverse isn’t a matter of wondering where they’d be if they went for an MBA rather than a Ph.D. Instead, the idea pops up in several scientific contexts. Quantum mechanics gave rise to deep questions about how the act of observation affects the reality being observed. The effort to answer those questions led some physicists to theorize that reality splits into different versions that go their separate ways, in line with what’s now known as the Many Worlds Interpretation.

On a different front, physicists have tried to reconcile the seemingly inconsistent implications of quantum mechanics and general relativity by proposing the existence of extra dimensions. These physicists say the inconsistencies can be mathematically resolved if there are, say, six or seven undetected dimensions in addition to our universe’s four-dimensional spacetime. A field of physics known as brane cosmology speculates that other realms of existence (or “branes,” short for membranes) could exist in parallel to our own realm.

And then there’s the Big Bang. To explain what they’re observing on the far frontiers of our accelerating universe, astrophysicists have proposed that the cosmos got its start in a bubble burst of inflation. Some have followed the trail even further, concluding that there’s no reason why our universe couldn’t spawn a multitude of bubble universes with different properties. (Sci-fi author Gregory Benford worked the idea into a 1998 novel titled “Cosm.”)

Where’s the evidence? Paul Halpern is a professor of physics at Saint Joseph’s University. (Image courtesy of Saint Joseph’s U. via Basic Books)

In his book — and in our podcast — Halpern traces the development of these theories, as well as efforts to track down evidence showing that a particular conception of the multiverse is correct.

Scientists have searched for traces of the multiverse at work in the temperature variations of cosmic microwave background radiation — the so-called afterglow of the Big Bang. They’ve tried to detect primordial gravitational waves that could tell them about the history of cosmic inflation. They’ve looked for signs of gravitons at the Large Hadron Collider, or small-scale variations in the force of gravity that could point to interactions with extra dimensions.

So far, these scientists have struck out. Some have even given up, after concluding that the multiverse hypothesis is an unprovable “theory of anything” and therefore shouldn’t be considered science.

Despite the strikeouts, Halpern hopes physicists will keep on swinging.

“The argument against even considering multiverse models is the lack of observational evidence,” he says. “However, there are many new tools in science that could be used to probe what happened at the beginning of our universe, right after the Big Bang.”

Fine-scale measurements of polarization patterns in the cosmic microwave background radiation could still turn up evidence of “scars” left behind by collisions with other bubble universes. There’s still a chance that gravitational-wave surveys could reveal evidence of interactions with other universes.

“And finally, there’s a burgeoning area of simulating cosmology, and looking to see what models suggest the production of other universes,” Halpern says. “That wouldn’t be experimental proof, but that would provide an important clue as to whether or not you can have our universe with what we believe is an initial state of ultra-rapid expansion called inflation.”

So, is the multiverse for real? Halpern is optimistic that scientists will eventually find ways to answer that question, even though they’ve found nothing but dead ends so far. “I look at the history of physics, and there are so many things that started with false starts,” he says.

Halpern points out that it took decades for physicists to find sufficient evidence for the existence of dark matter and dark energy, black holes and gravitational waves — long-shot efforts that led to Nobel Prizes.

“We have to be patient sometimes with theoretical physics and its predictions,” he says.

Head on over to the original version of this posting on Cosmic Log to get Paul Halpern’s reading recommendations for multiverse mavens. For still more about the multiverse, check out our previous Fiction Science interview with string theorist Brian Greene — plus a doubleheader with physicist Michio Kaku talking about “The God Equation” and “Quantum Supremacy.”

My co-host for the Fiction Science podcast is Dominica Phetteplace, an award-winning writer who is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop and currently lives in San Francisco. To learn more about Phetteplace, visit her website, DominicaPhetteplace.com.

Stay tuned for future episodes of the Fiction Science podcast via Apple,  Google,  Overcast, Spotify, Player.fm, Pocket Casts and Radio Public. If you like Fiction Science, please rate the podcast and subscribe to get alerts for future episodes.

The post Why Serious Scientists Are Mesmerized by the Multiverse appeared first on Universe Today.

The rules of statistical physics address the uncertainty about the state of a system that arises when that system interacts with its environment. But they've long missed another kind. In a new paper, researchers argue that uncertainty in the thermodynamic parameters themselves -- built into equations that govern the energetic behavior of the system -- may also influence the outcome of an experiment.

Researchers have developed a platform that combines automated experiments with AI to predict how chemicals will react with one another, which could accelerate the design process for new drugs.

Textbook models will need to be re-drawn after a team of researchers found that water molecules at the surface of salt water are organised differently than previously thought.

New findings debunk previous wisdom that solid-state qubits need to be super dilute in an ultra-clean material to achieve long lifetimes. Instead, cram lots of rare-earth ions into a crystal and some will form pairs that act as highly coherent qubits, a new paper shows.

New findings debunk previous wisdom that solid-state qubits need to be super dilute in an ultra-clean material to achieve long lifetimes. Instead, cram lots of rare-earth ions into a crystal and some will form pairs that act as highly coherent qubits, a new paper shows.

New research has cracked a vital process in the creation of a unique rock type from the Moon. The discovery explains its signature composition and very presence on the lunar surface at all, unraveling a mystery which has long-eluded scientists.

In organic optoelectronic devices, the control of molecular deposition on thin films is important for optimal surface arrangement and device performance. In a recent study, researchers developed a new method for achieving stable deposition on thin films effectively. They also developed a tool to track real-time potential changes on the surface. These findings are expected to aid the improvement of organic devices, such as organic light-emitting diodes, in terms of efficacy and durability.

The Atlantic is actually becoming a reasonable venue instead of a woke one.  Example in point: this article by podcaster and writer Josh Barro.  We’ve probably encountered most of his indictments before, but he explains why the problems with American universities is making most Americans—Democrats, Republicans, and independents—lose respect for the institutions. Click to read, or, if the article is paywalled,  you can find an archived version here.

First, the data that constitute the problem (Barro’s words are indented):

Over the past few years, conservatives have rapidly lost trust in higher education. From 2015 to 2023, Gallup found that the share of Republicans expressing “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education fell by 37 points, from 56 to 19 percent. As conservatives have come to look negatively at these institutions, Republicans have engaged in political attacks on the sector, most recently in the fact-finding and pressure campaign that caused Claudine Gay to resign as president of Harvard.

This decline is something close to common knowledge. Less discussed is the fact that public confidence in colleges has fallen significantly across all ideological groups since 2015. Though Republicans’ confidence cratered the most, Gallup found that it fell by 16 points among independents (from 48 to 32 percent) and nine points among Democrats (from 68 to 59 percent, not far from where Republicans were nine years ago).

Below are some data I found from that Gallup poll (click to enlarge if you can’t see the figures).

First, the data for all Americans, showing a drop in just the last 8 years from 57% to 36% in those who have either a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education:

And the data divided by demographics. Notice that confidence fell in other groups, too, especially those with no college degree, and also a greater decline among older than among younger people.

 

Why is this happening? According to Barro, and he seems on the mark to me, it’s largely because the institutions are perceived as dishonest and weaselly.  I’ll summarize his reasons, giving Barro’s quotes as either indented prose or with added quotation marks.

a.  Universities seem less interested in finding truth that in supporting an ideology, usually one aimed at social justice.  (Thinks of all the “studies” courses that exist now but didn’t in the past. Even the University of Chicago now has a Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity.)

b. “Their public accountings of the reasons for their internal actions are often implausible. They deceive the public about the role that race plays in their admissions and hiring practices.”  It’s clear that many universities now are trying to maintain race-based admissions though that’s been outlawed by the Supreme Court.  And there doesn’t seem to be any push to expand ideological or political diversity.

This also goes for hiring practices as well as undergraduate admissions. A quote from Barro:

Because using racial quotas in hiring is illegal, universities can’t explicitly admit to setting positions aside for candidates from underrepresented minorities. Instead they use ideological screens and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statement reviews as a proxy for race. This approach has many drawbacks—in addition to involving a concealment of the university’s true objectives, it is of no use to Black and Hispanic candidates who are not interested in “ideologically supercharged” areas of study, and sometimes it leads to the hiring of white candidates anyway, if they know best how to include the magic trendy words in a DEI statement.

And a quote about Harvard’s litigation about race-based admissions policy, about which they simply dissimulated. This went all the way up to the Supreme Court, of course:

The dishonesty at elite universities extends beyond their research output to how they describe their admissions processes. Like many universities, Harvard has long used race as a factor in college admissions, producing a class that is less Asian and more Black and Hispanic than it would be if it did not consider race. Throughout the litigation over this practice, the university’s representatives didn’t just defend the appropriateness of race-conscious policies to promote diversity; they denied that they were discriminating at all. They played word games—similar to the “what even is plagiarism?” bit deployed by Gay’s defenders—arguing somehow that race could be used as a positive factor for admission without ever being a negative one, a mathematical impossibility when awarding a fixed number of admission slots.

c. The degrees that universities give “will not justify the time and money that students invest in them.” I’m sure this is one factor, as some schools give degrees with ridiculous names, or “studies” degrees that would make it hard to get a job. And, of course, schools are expensive, especially for “elite” colleges. This is what it’ll take you to send a student to Harvard next year. If you multiply that by four, you get nearly $320,000, not counting books and other supplies.

Even at the state school where I went, The College of William & Mary, tuition for an out-of-state student is $63,967, not that much less than Harvard’s, while in-state students pay amore reasonable amount: $39,595 When I went there it was $1200 per year, which works out, with inflation, to be the equivalent of $10,800 today—a bit more than just half in real money of the student tuition-only fee of $18,252. But the point is that except for state schools if you’re a resident, college costs more than many parents make.

Of course you shouldn’t look at college as a way to get a pecuniary return on your investment, but that’s the way things have become. It’s this “consumerist” mentality that is in fact ruining many colleges, leading to lame “pop culture” courses, grade inflation, the decline of the humanities, and the fear of professors that their students will beef because they’re not getting a monetary return. (When I taught evolution to students who were mostly pre-meds, I got complaints that evolution wouldn’t help students become better doctors. And they’re largely right, but that’s not the point of studying evolution.)

d. The “replication crisis” affecting the reliability of data has led people to think that many researchers are either sloppy or dishonest, so what you learn in college may not be trustworthy.  This is Barro’s accusation, though I don’t see it as nearly as big a contributor to the problem as the first three issues above.

e.  The waffling, euphemisms, and plagiarism evidenced in the Claudine Gray scandal. This doesn’t play into the Gallup data above, which were compiled before Gay resigned as President of Harvard, but it’s surely embedded in the minds of the public now. They also remember the waffling that she, Liz Magill, and Sally Kornbluth showed during the House hearing. Granted, they were being bullied, but none of them made a particularly good showing, and Magill has resigned as well. This, I think, did a great deal to debase higher education in the minds of Americans. I’m not even mentioning the use of euphemisms like “duplicative language” instead of “plagiarism,” which didn’t fool anyone but made Harvard look defensive and weaselly.

f. Even science has been tarred by misguided advice by experts, especially during the pandemic. Barro:

Yet another distortion of  academic output is subject-matter specialists using the guise of expertise to impose their policy preferences on the public. This phenomenon exploded as a huge problem early in the coronavirus pandemic, and it wasn’t limited to universities—some of the public-health professionals who fought to turn transmission estimates into policies that closed schools, offices, and places of worship were on faculties, some were at hospitals, some worked for the government, and some just posted a lot on Twitter. But I’ll say that several years of hearing “science says” prior to claims that weren’t science as such but rather were applications of scientific claims through a specific value framework I didn’t share—part-communitarian, part-neurotic, part-left wing—made

I’m going to add two others, which are mine. Here they are. They’re coming now. First, the deplatforming of speakers. This mainly affects conservative speakers, like federal judge Kyle Duncan, who was shouted down at Stanford Law School, an incident for which the university had to apologize. This, of course, turns off more right-wing than left-wing Americans, but the problem is that all Americans are losing confidence in colleges, and many on the Left, like me, still favor free speech for everyone.

Second, the spread of identity politics and identity issues, which “intersects” with several of the issues above. These include “studies,” DEI, and the segregation of students by race, often in “affinity houses” or in race-specific graduations. This again is guaranteed to anger a lot of people, including members of minorities who don’t favor this kind of voluntary segregation.

Finally, I want to quote one bit from Barro’s piece that’s particularly invidious:

The commentator Matt Yglesias wrote a few weeks ago about a paper by Jenny Bulstrode, a historian of science at the University of London, who alleges that a moderately notable metallurgical technique patented in England in the late 1700s was in fact stolen from the Black Jamaican metallurgists who really developed it. The problem with Bulstrode’s paper is that it marshals no real evidence for its allegation—not only failing to show that the Englishman Henry Cort was aware of a Jamaican metallurgical technique similar to the one he patented but failing to show even that such a technique was ever used in Jamaica.

The paper, because it fit into the fashionable category of “historian finds yet another thing that is racist,” garnered credulous press coverage. And when people pointed out that the paper didn’t have the goods, the editors of the journal that published it came out with a “what is truth, anyway”–type word salad in defense of the article, including this:

We by no means hold that “fiction” is a meaningless category—dishonesty and fabrication in academic scholarship are ethically unacceptable. But we do believe that what counts as accountability to our historical subjects, our readers and our own communities is not singular or to be dictated prior to engaging in historical study. If we are to confront the anti-Blackness of EuroAmerican intellectual traditions, as those have been explicated over the last century by DuBois, Fanon, and scholars of the subsequent generations we must grasp that what is experienced by dominant actors in EuroAmerican cultures as ‘empiricism’ is deeply conditioned by the predicating logics of colonialism and racial capitalism. To do otherwise is to reinstate older forms of profoundly selective historicism that support white domination.

This ideology-first, activism-oriented, the-truth-depends-on-who’s-looking approach leads me to suspect that a lot of what’s happening at universities isn’t really research—it’s social activism dressed up as research, which need not be of good quality so long as it has the right ideological goals.

Look at that word salad in the penultimate paragraph! As best I can figure, it really says that a paper which is completely bogus is okay, so long as it adheres to the narrative of white oppression and cultural appropriation. For the kind of “selective historicism” that called out Bulstrode’s paper simply “supports white domination”—even if Bulstrode was dead wrong.

Is this loss of trust good? In two ways, yes; in another way, no.  The good bits are that this lack of trust may force colleges to clean up their act. Further, people who really don’t want to go to college or need to go to college (John McWhorter says that college isn’t necessary for many people, and others may want to go to trade school), this could put them on a better career path.

But the worst part is that for those who really want a good university education, the structure has to be in place to offer one.  All of the problems above reduce the quality of education on tap, and, if you’re concerned about such things, will make America sink even lower in the worldwide competition for good colleges. Although I don’t care much whether, say, Britain offers a better college education than does the U.S. (I don’t know if this is the case), you simply want every school to be as good as it can, no matter where it is.

Barro has put his finger on a serious issue, and perhaps now that GayGate has occurred and the Supreme Court has begun dismantling DEI, the decline in respect for colleges may slow or even reverse.

 

h/t: Carl

 

Efforts are underway to tidy up the ocean's biggest plastic hotspot. But this cleanup operation could be damaging a unique ecosystem and doing little to stop the overwhelming plastic problem

Athayde Tonhasca Júnior is back, taking us on a trip to Madeira. His captions are indented, and you can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Ilha da Madeira (Wood Island) sits some 900 km to the southwest of Portugal and 700 km west of Morocco. The island is the largest of the Madeira Archipelago, a Portuguese autonomous region. It has no beaches to speak of, but that doesn’t deter hordes of European tourists, mostly Continental Portuguese, Britons and Germans, who are lured by the island’s year-round mild climate and abundant sunshine. Inevitably, the horrors of mass-tourism are creeping in. But a judicious visitor that avoids the high season, festival days and resort hot spots near the capital Funchal, can have a memorable time – if in possession of strong legs and sturdy shoes.

Funchal is not at all a photogenic city, but it has several museums, gardens and monuments such as this homage to João Gonçalves Zarco (c. 1390-1471), winner of the Godzilla Prize for urban developer of the millennium. Prince Henrique the Navigator tasked Zarco with creating the right conditions for agriculture to encourage colonization in the hitherto uninhabited island. Zarco set to it, but faced a considerable obstacle hinted in the island’s name: a thick, luxurious forest blanketed it. But an easy solution was at hand – fire. Zarco set the island alight, and the inferno was reputed to have lasted seven years. The lowland native vegetation was wiped out, giving way to sugar cane © Vitor Oliveira, Wikimedia Commons:

A gondola lift from Funchal to the parish of Monte, a vertical climb of 560 m.:

In the 1850s, Monte residents were fed up with the long and boring slog to the city centre. So they came up with a speedier and more exciting alternative: to careen downhill in a carro de cesto (basket car), a wicker basket sledge mounted on wooden runners. Soon tourists wanted to hop on board, and today a carro de cesto journey is one of Madeira’s main attractions – Ernest Hemingway declared it to be one of the most exhilarating rides of his life. Gravity and greased runners propel the sledge forward at speeds nearing 30 km/h, while two sledge drivers negotiate crossings, moving cars, stray dogs, pedestrians and kerbs. Watch a safety-conscious Brit have a go at it:

Madeira is a piscivores’ paradise. Funchal’s fish market offers an enormous variety of seafood, some with odd shapes and appearances such as the peixe-espada preto, or black scabbardfish (Aphanopus carbo). Espada com banana is a local delicacy, but The World Health Organization recommends consuming the fish ‘in moderation’. Despite being an oceanic, deep-sea creature, the black scabbardfish is contaminated with cadmium, lead, mercury and other unsavoury ingredients. No corner of Earth is safe from human screw-ups:

While piscivores will be impressed in Madeira, frugivores will be dazzled. Thanks to the island’s generous climate and fertile volcanic soil, a range of aromatic, flavourful and exotic fruits are grown, such as guava, custard apple, pitanga, prickly pear, passion fruit, and physalis – without mentioning the run-of-the mill banana, papaya, mango, grape and avocado, among others:

Madeirans call their island the ‘floating garden of the Atlantic’. You can spend days hopping from one garden to another:

Cabo Girão: with a 580-m free fall, this the highest promontory in Europe (yes, Madeira is legally European, despite being much closer to Africa). The green carpet on the bottom is grapevines. A sphincter-tightening skywalk was installed at the edge of the chasm after this photo was taken. Madeira is small (57 x 22 km), but during most of its history of human occupation, the interior was uninhabited and uncultivated because of its unforgiving topography of mountainous gorges classed as Very Steep, Terrifying or Ohmygod. To this day, villages are confined to the few spots of gentler slopes:

You would expect cars, lorries, coaches and motorcycles to go slow in this Wile E. Coyote & Road Runner film set. You would be wrong:

Madeira has one the most impressive irrigation systems in the world. The island is intersected by some 200 levadas, which are channels cut into stone that carry water from altitudes of up to 1,800 m in the northern and central mountains to the dry, arable land in the south. The channels, 50-60 cm deep, cover more than 3,000 km, including 40 km of tunnels. Water from the levadas is strictly controlled, distributed to villages and farmers in rations that average 15 minutes every two weeks. Each of the channels’ exits has its levadeiro, a person in charge of monitoring and managing the operation. For tourists, the paths that run along the levadas are excellent avenues for exploration, and the only way to reach some parts of the island. Some levadas are easy going, others require hunchbacked trudges in dark tunnels or pacing narrow strips between the water channel and the void. Routes, maps and possible hazards can be consulted in a variety of levadas guidebooks © Jotbe1961, Wikimedia Commons:

Levadas were built mostly by hand: men often handled their picks and shovels from wicker baskets suspended from above or tied by ropes. Here a group of workers construct a levada sometime between 1947 and 1952 © Cultura Madeir:

Cultivated terraces (poios in the local dialect) seen from the Levada do Norte, which is 50-km long with 7 km of tunnels, bringing water from an altitude of 1,000 m through mountains and valleys. The Portuguese, like the Italians, are experts is putting any scrap of land into cultivation. These terraces are very good at controlling erosion; no tractors here, though:

Curral das Freiras seen from Eira do Serrado viewpoint (1,095 m). The village was originally called Curral (pen), but was changed to Curral das Freiras (nuns’ pen) – as one version of the story goes – in 1566, when Funchal was raided by French corsairs. The good sisters from a local convent suspected that a shared religion would not be sufficient to deflate the enthusiasm of French marauders in heightened stages of concupiscence, so they skedaddled to the mountains. The humble Brides of Christ knew a thing or two about the world:

The village of Casas Próximas (“nearby houses”), which are not that near – 600 m below:

Ecological field work in Madeira is not for the easily intimidated:

Back to Funchal, just in time for Carnaval. According to a native historian, the island’s festival of debauchery inspired the Brazilian version. If so, Brazilians adapted it by tackling the Madeiran revellers’ overdressing, which must be a health and safety hazard in tropical climates:

Several enormous craters left by explosions have been spotted in Siberia over the past 15 years, and a new explanation links them to hot gas – and climate change

An antivaxxer by the 'nym "A Midwestern Doctor" makes an argument that COVID-19 vaccine "shedding" is not impossible despite the basic science that concludes it is. Sound familiar?

The post Why antivax arguments for COVID-19 vaccine “shedding” remind me of homeopathy first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Using artificial intelligence to scan surgery patients' medical records for signs of risky drinking might help spot those whose alcohol use raises their risk of problems during and after an operation, a new study suggests. The AI record scan tested in the study could help surgery teams know in advance which patients might need more education about such risks, or treatment to help them reduce their drinking or stop drinking for a period of time before and after surgery.