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As we all know by now, Harvard’s President Claudine Gay the first black woman head of the University, resigned on Tuesday (her letter of resignation, here, is also reproduced below the fold).  In her formal letter she doesn’t explain why she resigned, but simply says this:

. . . . after consultation with members of the Corporation, it has become clear that it is in the best interests of Harvard for me to resign so that our community can navigate this moment of extraordinary challenge with a focus on the institution rather than any individual.

There’s a soupçon of self-pity in her resignation, as well as calling attention to “personal attacks” and “threats fueled by racial animus.” I don’t doubt she received these, but had it been me, considerations of dignity would have compelled me to omit this stuff.  Still, it doesn’t bother me that much, but it’s worth noting this stuff:

Amidst all of this, it has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor — two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am — and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.

Originally there was speculation that Gay might resign because of her rather uninspiring performance testifying before a House committee, but I didn’t think her performance was that bad: she reiterated that Harvard’s speech code allowed people to call for Jewish genocide on some occasions, but not others. As she implied, “context matters,” and that’s true if one is adhering to the First Amendment. The problem was that Harvard had never adhered to the First Amendment, for it has no speech code stipulating that. Rather, Harvard applied its speech code unevenly, sanctioning or warning some people for “offenses” far smaller than saying, “Gas the Jews.”  The problem was not context but hypocrisy.

That said, I thought that this could be a “teachable moment” for Gay and Harvard, one that might prompt her and the Overseers to finally fix the problems with “free” speech at Harvard. But when accusations of plagiarism began accumulating, and were undoubtedly plagiarism, eventually her position became untenable (see above).  Do note that those accusations were leveled largely by conservatives: Christopher Rufo and the New York Post.  This shows you that, unless you want a plagiarist as President of Harvard, it’s not good to write off what conservatives say simply because of their politics.

Gay will be replaced temporarily by economist and physician Alan Garber, Harvard’s provost and chief academic officer. And then the search will begin for Gay’s replacement. There is lots of speculation here (will it be another black woman?, etc.), but I won’t engage in any prognostications. As for Gay, she will return to her position as tenured professor of government and African and African American studies. But the tweet below suggests that she’s going to keep the enormous salary she got as President—nearly a million bucks a year. And that implies that she made some kind of deal with the Overseers to resign quietly so long as she got to keep that huge salary.  To me that seems unfair, but it’s better for Harvard that she leaves and gets a big salary than if she stayed.

"Gay will now return to a role within the political science department, and will retain a salary on the same level as while she was president."

Cheating upwards, Gay returns to low-output low-impact scholarship, soothed by a $900,000/year salary.https://t.co/cTafPDhChy

— i/o (@eyeslasho) January 3, 2024

 

The New York Times allowed Dr. Gay to respond to her “resignation”—surely more than just a suggestion from the Corporation—by writing an op-ed giving her take on the matter. And I have to say that she’s far less dignified, far too unwilling to own up to why she was fired, and far too self-pitying for such a piece.It makes her look petty, fragile, and too willing to blame others for her faults.  She should have just stuck by her resignation letter. Click the headline below to read.

I’ve reproduced her op-ed, paragraph by paragraph (indented) with my own comments, which are flush left.

Gay begins with a combination of self-pity, virtue-flaunting, and deflecting the blame for her resignation onto others.  Now I have no use for people who threaten her or use the n-word, but again, considerations of dignity would, at least to me, mandate that she leave this stuff out.  The bit about “weaponizing her presidency”, and accusing “demagogues” (Ackman?) of engaging in a campaign to erode the ideals of Harvard is simply silly, and makes her look unwilling to accept any culpability. Furthermore, it’s not right. People like Steve Pinker have used the occasion not to impugn Gay or call for her resignation, but to lay out principles Harvard could use to improve itself.

On Tuesday, I made the wrenching but necessary decision to resign as Harvard’s president. For weeks, both I and the institution to which I’ve devoted my professional life have been under attack. My character and intelligence have been impugned. My commitment to fighting antisemitism has been questioned. My inbox has been flooded with invective, including death threats. I’ve been called the N-word more times than I care to count.

My hope is that by stepping down I will deny demagogues the opportunity to further weaponize my presidency in their campaign to undermine the ideals animating Harvard since its founding: excellence, openness, independence, truth.

Continuing on:

As I depart, I must offer a few words of warning. The campaign against me was about more than one university and one leader. This was merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society. Campaigns of this kind often start with attacks on education and expertise, because these are the tools that best equip communities to see through propaganda. But such campaigns don’t end there. Trusted institutions of all types — from public health agencies to news organizations — will continue to fall victim to coordinated attempts to undermine their legitimacy and ruin their leaders’ credibility. For the opportunists driving cynicism about our institutions, no single victory or toppled leader exhausts their zeal.

Here she shows what, exactly, is “bigger than me” (it should have been “bigger than I”). She clearly blames anti-wokeness as the force behind attacks on her.  Or at least that’s how I interpret it, for I can see no other forces trying to undermine “trusted institutions of all types”. Yes, the antiwoke went after the liberal media, but did they go after “public health agencies”? Perhaps, if you think that that’s what motivated the conspiracy theorists and Republicans who fought covid mandates. (But some of them were right, viz., about the value of masking and closing schools.)  Here Gay lumps together a whole bunch of disparate groups—conservatives, conspiracy theorists, people concerned with the truth about medicine, and liberals like me—as her “basket of demagogues.” The Associated Press implies that in the tweet below.  But does it really matter whether liberals, conservatives, or centrists call attention to plagiarism, so long as it turns out to be true?

Harvard president's resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges: plagiarism https://t.co/GiVkT3LgUo

— The Associated Press (@AP) January 3, 2024

Gay continues:

Yes, I made mistakes. In my initial response to the atrocities of Oct. 7, I should have stated more forcefully what all people of good conscience know: Hamas is a terrorist organization that seeks to eradicate the Jewish state. And at a congressional hearing last month, I fell into a well-laid trap. I neglected to clearly articulate that calls for the genocide of Jewish people are abhorrent and unacceptable and that I would use every tool at my disposal to protect students from that kind of hate.

Well, it would have been better for her not to have doubled down on Hamas, but rather to point out the hypocrisy of Harvard’s uneven enforcement of the speech code,  noting how odd it was that calls for adherence to the First Amendment arose only when that Amendment would have permitted calls for genocide against Jews.  But yes, she appeared wooden and unengaged, and she could have done better. Blame the lawyers. Still, her performance alone would not have gotten her to “resign” (the euphemism for “being asked to leave”).

Then she goes on to the plagiarism charges, refusing to admit she copied (well, she could hardly admit that, could she?):

Most recently, the attacks have focused on my scholarship. My critics found instances in my academic writings where some material duplicated other scholars’ language, without proper attribution. I believe all scholars deserve full and appropriate credit for their work. When I learned of these errors, I promptly requested corrections from the journals in which the flagged articles were published, consistent with how I have seen similar faculty cases handled at Harvard.

I have never misrepresented my research findings, nor have I ever claimed credit for the research of others. Moreover, the citation errors should not obscure a fundamental truth: I proudly stand by my work and its impact on the field.

Despite the obsessive scrutiny of my peer-reviewed writings, few have commented on the substance of my scholarship, which focuses on the significance of minority office holding in American politics. My research marshaled concrete evidence to show that when historically marginalized communities gain a meaningful voice in the halls of power, it signals an open door where before many saw only barriers. And that, in turn, strengthens our democracy.

Here plagiarism becomes “material that duplicated other scholars’ language, without proper attribution”.  It’s been euphemisms all the way down with her and Harvard, with nobody daring to use the p-word.  However, she requested corrections of only three items (there were forty or more), and attributed her mistakes to “errors”—as do all plagiarists. It’s hardly possible, I think, to engage in the amount of plagiarism she did without knowing that you’re doing something wrong.  She also decries the people who brought her down as being afflicted with “obsessive scrutiny”.  Her “scholarship” is still under question, with some saying that what she published from her thesis differs from what the original sources say, but we’ll wait to see how that shakes out.

Throughout this work, I asked questions that had not been asked, used then-cutting-edge quantitative research methods and established a new understanding of representation in American politics. This work was published in the nation’s top political science journals and spawned important research by other scholars.

Never did I imagine needing to defend decades-old and broadly respected research, but the past several weeks have laid waste to truth. Those who had relentlessly campaigned to oust me since the fall often trafficked in lies and ad hominem insults, not reasoned argument. They recycled tired racial stereotypes about Black talent and temperament. They pushed a false narrative of indifference and incompetence.

I’ll let others assess her scholarship and methods, but let it be known that she published a total of only eleven papers in her career (and edited one volume), a remarkably thin record of scholarship for a scholar picking up the reins of Harvard. As for the “truth” of her research, other scholars are now vetting her papers (some have claimed that she won’t provide her original data), and we’ll see what happens. If she did manipulate or misrepresent data, that is one thing that could cost her her job at Harvard, though I doubt that this will happen.

It is not lost on me that I make an ideal canvas for projecting every anxiety about the generational and demographic changes unfolding on American campuses: a Black woman selected to lead a storied institution. Someone who views diversity as a source of institutional strength and dynamism. Someone who has advocated a modern curriculum that spans from the frontier of quantum science to the long-neglected history of Asian Americans. Someone who believes that a daughter of Haitian immigrants has something to offer to the nation’s oldest university.

Above she descends deeply into defensiveness and self-pity, and most clearly plays the race card, which is beneath her. Yes, racists may have assailed her, but she should ignore them in a public discussion like this, except perhaps for a brief mention. There’s no evidence that she was attacked by Rufo, Ackman and the NY Post because of her race. In Ackman’s case, it was clearly his being fed up with the antisemitism at Harvard, not Gay’s race. Self-pity is undignified.

Finally, she engages in a bit of virtue flaunting, and once again refers to the demagogues who brought her down, implying that she was unfairly pressured to resign by Evil Outside Forces pursuing an agenda to destroy Harvard’s wonderful values:

I still believe that. As I return to teaching and scholarship, I will continue to champion access and opportunity, and I will bring to my work the virtue I discussed in the speech I delivered at my presidential inauguration: courage. Because it is courage that has buoyed me throughout my career and it is courage that is needed to stand up to those who seek to undermine what makes universities unique in American life.

Having now seen how quickly the truth can become a casualty amid controversy, I’d urge a broader caution: At tense moments, every one of us must be more skeptical than ever of the loudest and most extreme voices in our culture, however well organized or well connected they might be. Too often they are pursuing self-serving agendas that should be met with more questions and less credulity.

College campuses in our country must remain places where students can learn, share and grow together, not spaces where proxy battles and political grandstanding take root. Universities must remain independent venues where courage and reason unite to advance truth, no matter what forces set against them.

It all comes down to this summary statement: “Antiwoke people, including demagogues, brought me down, largely because of my race. Yes, I made mistakes, but they were trivial. In the end, it was political grandstanding that pried me out of my position as President. And by the way, I’m a very good person.”

She’s enmired in victimhood. Color me unimpressed.

Click “continue reading” to see Gay’s letter of resignation:

Forgive the formatting, which is what happened when I did a cut-and-paste on her letter.

Dear Members of the Harvard Community,

It is with a heavy heart but a deep love for Harvard that I write to share that I will be stepping down as president. This is not a decision I came to easily. Indeed, it has been difficult beyond words because I have looked forward to working with so many of you to advance the commitment to academic excellence that has propelled this great university across centuries. But, after consultation with members of the Corporation, it has become clear that it is in the best interests of Harvard for me to resign so that our community can navigate this moment of extraordinary challenge with a focus on the institution rather than any individual.

It is a singular honor to be a member of this university, which has been my home and my inspiration for most of my professional career. My deep sense of connection to Harvard and its people has made it all the more painful to witness the tensions and divisions that have riven our community in recent months, weakening the bonds of trust and reciprocity that should be our sources of strength and support in times of crisis. Amidst all of this, it has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor — two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am — and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.

I believe in the people of Harvard because I see in you the possibility and the promise of a better future. These last weeks have helped make clear the work we need to do to build that future — to combat bias and hate in all its forms, to create a learning environment in which we respect each other’s dignity and treat one another with compassion, and to affirm our enduring commitment to open inquiry and free expression in the pursuit of truth. I believe we have within us all that we need to heal from this period of tension and division and to emerge stronger. I had hoped with all my heart to lead us on that journey, in partnership with all of you. As I now return to the faculty, and to the scholarship and teaching that are the lifeblood of what we do, I pledge to continue working alongside you to build the community we all deserve.

When I became president, I considered myself particularly blessed by the opportunity to serve people from around the world who saw in my presidency a vision of Harvard that affirmed their sense of belonging — their sense that Harvard welcomes people of talent and promise, from every background imaginable, to learn from and grow with one another. To all of you, please know that those doors remain open, and Harvard will be stronger and better because they do.

As we welcome a new year and a new semester, I hope we can all look forward to brighter days. Sad as I am to be sending this message, my hopes for Harvard remain undimmed. When my brief presidency is remembered, I hope it will be seen as a moment of reawakening to the importance of striving to find our common humanity — and of not allowing rancor and vituperation to undermine the vital process of education. I trust we will all find ways, in this time of intense challenge and controversy, to recommit ourselves to the excellence, the openness, and the independence that are crucial to what our university stands for — and to our capacity to serve the world.

Sincerely,
Claudine Gay

Engineers have succeeded in implementing a stretchable organic solar cell by applying a newly developed polymer material that demonstrated the world's highest photovoltaic conversion efficiency (19%) while functioning even when stretched for more than 40% of its original state. This new conductive polymer has high photovoltaic properties that can be stretched like rubber. The newly developed polymer is expected to play a role as a power source for next-generation wearable electronic devices.

Data Assimilation (DA) is an important mathematical method for predicting turbulent flows for weather forecasting. However, the origins of the critical length scale, a crucial parameter in this method, and its dependence on the Reynolds number are not well understood. Now, researchers have developed a novel theoretical framework that treats DA as a stability problem to explain this parameter. This framework can contribute significantly to turbulence research and inspire novel data-driven methods to predict turbulence.

Not only do many bats die at wind turbines, the turbines also displace some species from their habitats over large areas. When the turbines are in operation at relatively high wind speeds, the activity of bat species that hunt in structurally dense habitats such as forests drops by almost 80 per cent within a radius of 80 to 450 meters around the turbine.

Researchers 3D printed a mini quadrupole mass filter, a key component of a mass spectrometer, that performs as well as some commercial-grade devices. It can be fabricated in hours for a few dollars and is one step toward producing a portable mass spectrometer that could enable effective medical diagnoses or chemical analyses in remote areas.

The integration of mechanical memory in the form of springs has for hundreds of years proven to be a key enabling technology for mechanical devices (like clocks), achieving advanced functionality through complex autonomous movements. In our times, the integration of springs in silicon-based microtechnology has opened the world of planar mass-producible mechatronic devices from which we all benefit, via air-bag sensors for example.

Trends come and go but the popularity of detoxification and cleansing in January is eternal.

The post 2024 Detox Trends To Watch (Out) For first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

This is one of the biggest thought experiments in science today – as we look for life elsewhere in the universe, what should we be looking for, exactly? Other stellar systems are too far away to examine directly, and even our most powerful telescopes can only resolve points of light. So how do we tell if there is life on a distant exoplanet? Also, how could we detect a distant technological civilization?

Here is where the thought experiment comes in. We know what life on Earth is like, and we know what human technology is like, so obviously we can search for other examples of what we already know. But the question is – how might life different from life on Earth be detected? What are the possible signatures of a planet covered in living things that perhaps look nothing like life on Earth. Similarly, what alien technologies might theoretically exist, and how could we detect them?

A recent paper explores this question from one particular angle – are there conditions on a planet that are necessary for the development of technology? They hypothesize that there is an “oxygen bottleneck”, a minimum concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere of a planet, that is necessary for the development of advanced technology. Specifically they argue that open air combustion, which requires a partial pressure (PO2) of oxygen of ≥ 18% (it’s about 21% on Earth), is necessary for fire and metallurgy, and that these are necessary stepping stones on the path to advanced technology.

There are a lot of assumptions in this argument, but they do a descent job of defending it. I’ve long thought an aquatic species, even if very intelligent, would not be able to develop advanced technology under water. This is a similar argument. They also point out that oxygen-based life itself can exist with much lower PO2, so there may be many planets out there with a biosignature of oxygen compatible with life, but too low to be a technosignature. They suggest we should focus our efforts to find other technosignatures on planets with high PO2.

They consider other types of atmospheres that might be compatible with life, but none are compatible with open air combustion – hence the notion of the oxygen bottleneck for the development of advanced technology.

While this is all a very interesting and potentially useful thought experiment, it is frustrating that we completely lack data. This is the same problem we have with the search for biosignatures – it challenges our imagination as to what is possible. The universe is an awfully big place, which provides for trillions of opportunities to experiment. This means that even extremely unlikely scenarios are still likely to exist, given enough opportunities. Therefore, saying that something is unlikely is not enough. We will likely find examples of everything out there in the universe unless it is so unlikely that it is essentially impossible.

It is useful to examine the physics of a hypothesis to determine if a certain type of life or technology is possible within the laws of physics. If it is truly impossible, then we can rule it out. But if it is possible, even if extremely unlikely, then we can’t.

But the big problem I have with this approach is that it is ultimately limited by our imagination. Even though the human imagination is quite expansive, it is still nothing compared to the scope of the universe. It is hard to capture in a thought experiment the real world experiment of trillions of worlds. Perhaps, for example, there might be other pathways to advanced technology, just not a type of technology that we are familiar with.

Here evolution is a good example. Biology has come up with countless clever solutions and workarounds to the challenges of life, ones that would be difficult to imagine and design from the top down. But given the countless opportunities for evolutionary experimentation, strange and unlikely solutions emerge. Similarly, perhaps most aquatic species never develop spacefaring technology, but if there are enough of them out there it may happen occasionally, through some weird path we have not imagined.

But even if the “oxygen bottleneck” is not absolute, it still may be a useful statistical realization. Open air combustion may not be necessary for the development of technology, but it does provide a relatively easy and high-probability pathway. Therefore we may be more likely to detect technosignatures on exoplanets with high oxygen levels. If we have a lot of choices we might as well start with the low-hanging fruit.

There is also the notion that we are more likely to recognize technosignatures for familiar technology. We can better imagine technology that results from open air combustion and what that might look like, and therefore know what the technosignatures might be. If an alien species did develop an alien technology through an alternate pathway, we might not even recognize it when we see it.

As long as we are stuck with an N of 1 when it comes to life and technology, all we can do is thought experiments, and keep looking for some actual data.

The post Oxygen As A Technosignature first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

Researchers have created a functional semiconductor from graphene for the first time, creating the possibility of computer chips with greater performance and efficiency

The populations of species including bateleurs and secretary birds have fallen precipitously within the past 50 years, putting these birds at risk of extinction

Electrically stimulating part of the brain makes people more susceptible to hypnosis, which has shown promise for treating conditions such as chronic pain

In the largest survey yet of AI researchers, a majority say there is a non-trivial risk of human extinction due to the possible development of superhuman AI

A large language model can translate written instructions into code for a robot’s movement, enabling it to perform a wide range of human-like actions

When you drive past any American school, you’ll see signs telling you to reduce your speed and declaring the area to be a “drug-free zone,” with draconian penalties for violators. While we can all agree on keeping drugs away from school children, drugs are not the only thing we keep out of schools. Unfortunately, when it comes to educational policy and practice, research findings have also found themselves banned from schools. Why is that?

The State of Education Research

Getting your measurements and calculations right matters immensely when building an airplane that is unlikely to crash or a building unlikely to collapse. In Turkey and Syria, when a 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit, outdated building methods contributed greatly to the death toll.1 Engineers and builders need to make sure that the evidence they bring to the table is factually correct. Once you leave the concrete world where accurate facts are prized—or at least clearly have consequences you can detect—things get a lot fuzzier. In the realm of social science, particularly education and policy research, it isn’t always clear to a policy maker, practitioner, or parent what constitutes good evidence, especially when experts disagree.

Does that mean that researchers in the social sciences and education don’t think they have accumulated important evidence? No. So, from the perspective of those who recognize the value of accumulated knowledge and research evidence, it’s confusing why those in education policy and practice don’t appear to listen to researchers or fail to use what is considered the “best evidence” to date on a particular topic. When he realized that most research doesn’t impact policy or practice, educational psychologist David Berliner lamented: “Once upon a time, early in my career, when the world seemed quite a bit simpler than it really is, I believed that my research, and that done by my fellow educational psychologists, would influence what happens in America’s classrooms and in teacher education. I believed in the model of research that famous researchers often espoused.”2 And that’s often the belief many graduate students from the social sciences initially hold, and that many distinguished scholars in their specific subfields still hold. Why?

Education is filled with fads and myths. Hot topics such as learning styles,3 multiple intelligences,4 grit,5 and mindset6 have, at best, only weak support, even though they continue to be trumpeted by the media and have become a part of the popular conversation. Though these are well-recognized examples, the history of education shows7, 8 that they are by no means exceptions.

The replication crisis in which many published research results have proven difficult or even impossible to reproduce, has sent shock waves across all areas of science,9 especially social science,10 including the oftentimes policy-influential domain of economics.11 A paper published in Science that estimated the reproducibility of psychological science research was downloaded over 40,000 times and covered in over 231 news outlets,12 for example, “Over half of psychology studies fail reproducibility test” (Nature13) and “Psychology’s replication crisis is running out of excuses” (The Atlantic14). Not only are social scientists themselves justifiably skeptical whether some seemingly established findings will stand the test of time, but the broader public has become cynical regarding the value of expert opinion in general.

Within the social sciences, different fields have different theoretical, empirical, and tool-based approaches they employ based on their niche-specific promotion incentive structures (pay, promotion, awards, recognition), typically linked to publishing in particular field-valued journals. Generally, the more publications you have in the more prestigious journals, the greater your chance of receiving pay raises, promotions, prizes, and other perks. Since this translates into the need to write for the handful of peers in one’s field, the disciplines are largely siloed, i.e., publications and information get stacked up in specialist journals, encased in technical language, equations, and symbols. Only rarely, and at risk, do scholars dare build on the work of those outside their own discipline, or in some cases even within them. The unfortunate reality is that the use of research-based evidence in formulating education policy is quite limited because politics and personal values dominate. For example:

Ron Haskins, a respected former Republican committee staffer in Congress and now a Brookings Institution scholar, was asked several years ago about the role research played in what was, at the time, a contentious congressional debate about welfare reform. Without missing a beat, he responded that, based on his personal experience, the best research might exert five percent of the total influence on the policy debate, with an upside potential of 10 percent. Personal values and political power, Haskins went on to say to his now silent and disappointed audience, were what really mattered in Congress.15

Why Research Carries Little Weight in Policymaking

Policymakers16, 17 have explained that research use is not really linear in the way that most researchers hope.18 On the playing field of hardball politics, research is more often used to: (a) support and justify a favored, pre-existing ideological, and long-held point of view, or (b) help inform the thinking around a decision-making process in a way that is quite specific, context-dependent, and disconnected from the findings in a journal article. Simply stated, research results usually just sit on the bench during the policy-making process.

Moreover, the rigor of the methods employed is rarely the primary concern of those using the research. In making policy, what counts is whether a given piece of research provides support for a predetermined decision, in a particular on-the-ground context. Bill Knudsen, former Deputy Assistant Secretary in the U.S. Department of Education, noted in a personal communication that, based on what he saw in working with legislators, perhaps at most 10 percent of decision making in education policy is evidence-based, and the definition of what is considered as evidence is quite loose, with little distinction made between mere qualitative evidence and the ascending levels of scientific rigor such as Randomized Controlled Trials (RCT) evidence and above. (See Figure 1.) Of course, the unfortunate fact that evidence often fails to impact practice is also true in health care19 and numerous other fields: “Yet even today, health care experts maintain that 80 percent to 90 percent of daily medical practice is not anchored in such evidence because the specific, detailed information practitioners need still does not exist.”20

Figure 1. Research Design & Evidence Chart, redrawn based on a chart by CFCF [CC BY-SA 4.0] (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence-based_education)

One reason for this lacuna is that in U.S. education policy a small set of individuals, often dominated by education economists or graduates from certain types of education policy or reform programs, tend to cite each other while ignoring a lot of the broader social science evidence that has important bearing on particular topics.21 And this is probably not intentional. When you are trained to think in a certain way and exposed largely to many others who also think that same way and value similar research methods and approaches, groupthink tends to take hold. While this problem is inherent to all academic disciplines, not just education policy, some are better than others at being truly multidisciplinary.

Academics who produce research evidence across social sciences and in education believe their subfield has much to offer those in education policy and practice. So they often feel frustrated that decision makers don’t usually read their publications. And the public doesn’t read research publications either: A.K. Biswas and Julian Kircher, who measured the impact of academic conferences and publications on real-world practice, noted, “Practitioners very rarely read articles published in peer-reviewed journals. We know of no senior policymaker or senior business leader who ever read regularly any peer-reviewed papers in well recognized journals like Nature, Science or Lancet.”22

The history of education reform shows that most efforts have not proven successful.7 This is largely because top-down education reform efforts tend to evaporate at the point of impact, namely, the classroom.8 This is true even for efforts such as common core, which enjoyed wide bipartisan support.23 The disconnect between research and policy/practice is the rule, not the exception. Nor is such lack of success confined to education. Reform efforts in criminal justice and welfare policy often have gone awry.15 The education research and policy community often avoid discussing failure,25 perhaps in part because many look to education as the solution to those, and, increasingly, most perceived problems in society. Thus, though educational research has accumulated and, in some ways, has become more rigorous, the disconnect between research on the one hand and policy and practice on the other has remained quite consistent over time.2 Realistic policy scholars argue that this doesn’t mean policy reform should be abandoned, but only that incremental change is more likely to prove effective than any quick-fix “silver bullets.”24

Solutions

Some simply accept the verdict of history—the disconnect between research and practice is to be expected as the default condition in any field. This is especially true given that experts in education policy are unclear as to what a genuine solution might look like. Nonetheless, there continue to be important efforts to join the two. Both history and common sense suggest that gradual steps, monitored, measured, and revised, hold greater promise than one massive attempt to bridge the chasm. Here are some suggestions.

Improve the quality of evidence.

A necessary first step is to improve the research evidence base in education policy. Sadly, replications in the field of education are not standard at present. When researchers looked at the top 100 education journals they found that only 0.13 percent of education articles were replications.26 And though economists are highly influential in education policy as a research field, as are political scientists and to some extent sociologists, the research of psychologists and other social and behavioral scientists is noticeable only by their scarcity. Economic thinking and approaches are influential in all areas of policy, including in education,27 though they provide only one of the toolsets available for researching social science, education, and policy issues.28

Additionally, a small group of education policy scholars and influencers in think tanks dominate and serve as gatekeepers determining which ideas gain entry to shape the research, which topics are discussed, and which never receive a fair hearing.21 A truly multidisciplinary approach to integrating evidence from every possible discipline relevant to education research and policy would be another important step in improving the evidence base in education. New research is not always necessary—just integrating research evidence that has accumulated in as yet unincorporated fields would be productive.

Multidisciplinarity, of course, faces the incentive structure constraints in academia that arise from the silo effect described earlier, but hopefully that too can change incrementally over time.29 One way would be to first get the broader public, especially policymakers and practitioners, to read research.22 Even when the most rigorous relevant research is collected in an educational repository such as What Works Clearinghouse, policymakers and practitioners often don’t take the time to read it. They have different incentives and interests than researchers, who are trained and then rewarded in designing experiments and evaluating scientific evidence.30

Engage the public.

Academics should publicly engage and teach scholars in other fields as well as the broader public about their research, whether through writing for the news and in magazines, going on podcasts and doing interviews, writing popular books and articles, using social media, and other methods.31 Some go so far as advocating giving research away to the public by making clear accounts of research methods freely available on the Internet, along with the data and results so that they can be replicated easily. However, this must be done responsibly, given that the replication crisis has made it unclear in some areas whether the cumulative evidence is strong enough to communicate or be useful in policy and practice.32 The challenge here is to explain just how research results published in an academic journal are actually relevant to the average person in their everyday life.

Build better relationships.

If they want to influence policy, researchers should get to know state-level policymakers and form mutually beneficial relationships with them. Policy making at the national level is usually out of reach, so there is a greater chance at the state or more local level.15 Doing so, however, is a two-way street. Building relationships with state or local-level policymakers and politicians requires learning how the political process works and being available to help solve real, on-the-ground problems within short time frames.

Communicate in plain language.

Academics also need to be able to communicate their findings in plain language so that those outside academia—or even their particular discipline—can understand and use that knowledge.32 History professor Patricia Limerick33 made this case forcefully in her poignant article titled, “Dancing with Professors: The Trouble with Academic Prose.” Other scholars argue: “If academics want to have an impact on policymakers and practitioners, they must consider popular media, which has been ignored by them.”22

New research is not always necessary—just integrating research evidence that has accumulated in as yet unincorporated fields would be productive.

The technical jargon used in each academic subfield often prevents integrating knowledge across subfields and hinders those outside of academia from using relevant research findings. Writing policy briefs and other publications in plain language is not incentivized by traditional academic positions where a Darwinian calculus rules in the form of “publish and get grants or perish.”34 However, it is precisely the mass media that can transmit knowledge so that research findings could better find their way into policy decision-making. Learning why, when, and how to enter the public arena should be integrated into graduate training programs across the physical, biological, and behavioral sciences if researchers have any hope of impacting policy and practice.

Publishing for the general public needs to be incentivized.

An additional challenge is that academia rewards producing research that those in policy and practice just don’t think addresses their needs.16 One solution would be for academia to reward scholars in the tenure and promotion process for communicating and publishing the relevance of their research findings to a broader audience. Doing so could be included as part of the service component of the usual research-teaching-service pay-and-promotion criteria.

Work with practitioners in research-practice partnerships.

Some education researchers are embracing Research Practice Partnerships (RPPs),16, 35 for example, between researchers at a university and practitioners in local schools. (Full disclosure: I’m involved in an RPP in Northwest Arkansas,36 and it is well worth it). RPPs work because practitioners are a part of the research process so that their research needs are met. While academic research questions are often disconnected from practice, there are some cases where not only the answers but also properly framed questions can be useful to practitioners. And for some questions, the results are publishable in an academic journal and so do reward the researchers.

Since RPPs are a partnership, the typical independence of the researcher for purposes of evaluation is not present and a clear conflict of interest could arise. However, because policy changes often are constrained by many moving parts, when the time comes for implementation, gradual yet positive change can move the needle provided that the practitioners understand why the research is useful and so are eager to use it to help kids in their schools.

Top-down solutions often won’t work.

Eric Kalenze,37 a leading authority in the field of curriculum and content development, argues that top-down reform efforts don’t work largely because there isn’t either the infrastructure or buy-in from schools that are necessary to make it happen. He explains how in the school where he taught, there was a period when a supportive principal and a group of dedicated teachers could truly make effective education reform work, but the confluence of these positive factors is hard to scale. Despite this, he argues that bottom-up efforts are worth pursuing to help kids, including efforts that build on evidence use.30

Involve the teachers.

Educational psychologist David Berliner argues:

It is the tinkering by teachers and researchers, and the study of their craft by the teachers themselves, that seems to me the most likely to pay off in improved education. If those in the research community can learn to do more design experiments in real-world settings, and join teacher-researchers to produce knowledge about how things work in real-world classrooms, the great disconnect might become a much smaller disconnect. Educational research would end up being less a field of traditional scientific research, and much more a field of engineering, invention, and design.38

This perspective aligns with the focus on RPPs through getting teacher buy-ins and developing mutual respect to bridge the disconnect.

* * *

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 28.3
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In their book Gradual: The Case for Incremental Change in a Radical Age, authors Greg Berman and Aubrey Fox explain that there have been successful policy reform efforts, such as Social Security, where the confluence of a large number of positive changes fortuitously came together.24 Perhaps by approaching all of these possible solutions while thinking of novel ways to end the separation between research and policy/ practice can lead to gradual but positive change. Avoiding unintended consequences will require a clear-headed understanding of all of the relevant research and facts that influence education.39

However, given the current climate of political polarization and the culture wars in education policy, the use of evidence in policy and practice remains an ongoing challenge, but one that might be overcome gradually, if more people better understood both the history of failures and the fact that radical changes are much less likely than positive small ones to help educate children — whether inside or outside of schools.40

About the Author

Jonathan Wai is Associate Professor and the Endowed Chair in Education Policy in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, with a joint appointment in the Department of Psychology. He is also Affiliate Faculty in Educational Psychology at the University of Alabama. He studies education policy through the lens of psychology. His fields of expertise include gifted education, talent development, intelligence, individual differences, higher education, educational psychology, expertise, and education policy.

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Jupiter’s largest moon, Ganymede, features a surprisingly strong magnetic field for its size. Tidal effects from Jupiter continually stretch and squeeze the moon, keeping its core warm and driving the magnetic field. But the exact geological processes occurring within the core are not fully understood. Now, a new experimental study has put one of the leading models of core dynamics to the test: the formation of crystalized ‘iron snow’.

The iron snow theory is like a geological ‘weather model’ for a planetary core: it describes how iron cools and crystalizes near the upper edge of the core (where it meets the mantle), then falls inwards and melts back into the liquid centre of the planet.

Ganymede’s core, in other words, is a molten metal snowglobe, shaken and stirred by Jupiter’s gravity.

This cycle of rising and falling iron “creates motions in the liquid core and provides energy for generating a magnetic field,” the researchers behind the study write. “However, the key aspects of this regime remain largely unknown.”

So they designed an experiment to test some of those aspects.

Of course, scientists can’t just peer inside a planetary core, so the team took to the laboratory, where they used water ice as an analog for iron snow crystals.

The experiment consisted of a tank of water, cooled from below. A salty layer of water rested at the tank’s bottom, representing the planetary mantle (and from a practical standpoint, helped keep the ice crystals from getting stuck to the bottom). On top of the brine was a layer of fresh water, representing the planet’s liquid core. Ice crystals formed near the bottom of the tank, where the salty and fresh water mingled, then floated upwards and melted in the warmer liquid above.

In other words, the experiment was an upside-down simulation of iron snow, with the snowflakes drifting up instead of down.

This setup allowed the team to test the behaviour of the crystals and their effect on the whole system.

Their findings were surprising. Instead of a steady flow of crystallization, rising, and melting, there were instead sporadic bouts of rapid activity, followed by periods of inactivity.

Why?

It appears that to trigger the crystallization process, the liquid needs to reach a supercooled state, below the temperature at which you would expect ice to solidify. Once that supercooled temperature is reached, it releases a flurry of snowflakes, and then pauses until the temperature is once again low enough to release a new bout of crystals.

Jupiter’s largest moon, Ganymede. Image Credit: By National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – http://sos.noaa.gov/download/dataset_table.html

This sporadic and cyclical process has significant ramifications for a planet’s magnetic fields. Iron snow at Ganymede would occur intermittently, and be localized at different places throughout the core. The result would be a shifting and dancing magnetic field that strengthens, weakens, and changes shape over time.

Ganymede isn’t the only place in the solar system where iron snow dominates the behaviour of planetary cores. It is a plausible description of core behaviour in all small planetary bodies, including our own Moon and Mercury, as well as Mars and large metallic asteroids.

In cases where magnetic fields are known to exist (like Mercury and Ganymede), it brings us one step closer to understanding the dynamics of those systems.

If you’re wondering, Earth’s core isn’t believed to be dominated by iron snow. The powerful pressure of gravity at the heart of our planet, along with a different composition of materials, means that metals in Earth’s core tend to solidify in the middle, then melt as they drift outwards, rather than snowing down from the mantle (though both processes might be present in some quantity, according to recent research).

Read the paper:

Ludovic Huguet, Michael Le Bars, and Renaud Deguen. “A Laboratory Model for Iron Snow in Planetary Cores.” Geophysics Research Letters.

The post Iron Snow Could Explain the Magnetic Fields at Worlds Like Ganymede appeared first on Universe Today.

Some years ago I rememeber running the SETI at Home screensaver and would watch it for hours to see if any peaks appeared naively thinking they might be signals from an alien civilisation! There is no doubt that the search for extraterrestrials (ET) has captivated the minds of many people across the years. The search has of course to date, been unsuccesful despite multiple observations that seem to suggest the conditions for life across the cosmos may actually be more common than we first thought. Now Chinese agencies are funding projects to use the Five Hundred Meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) to conduct searches for alien signals.

The Far Neighbour Project (FNP) was launched in 2023 and uses some interesting observational techniques to hunt for technosignatures from advanced civilisations. They are targetting nearby stars, exoplanet systems, local globular clusters and much more. A paper recently published by a team led by Tong-Jie Zhang explains how the team plans to use FAST along with new observational data analysis techniques in the hunt for alien signals. 

A home PC running SETI at Home helping to churn through observational data (Credit: SETI@home)

FAST – which has been nicknamed Tianyan meaning “Sky’s Eye” – is located in Pingtang County, soutwest China and was comissioned in 2016. It is the second largest single dish radio telescope in the world and has been constructed in a natural depression. The design is quite innovative with 4,500 metal panels which form a moving, active parabola. Like other large static dishes, there is a cabin suspended above the dish from cables. This can move automatically to steer the instrument to receive signals from which ever direction is required. 

The team are employing two new observation methods in the hope it will enhance and improve the results. First is the MultiBeam Coincidence Matching method (MBCM) which is similar to the On-Off method that has been commonly used in SETI observations. The On-Off concept assumes that a sky-localised signal would not be detected in multiple telescope observations at the same time. MBCM takes advantage of FASTs 19 beam receiver so that it can simultaneously record data in the centre beam AND the outermost beams. Then there is the MultiBeam Point-Source Scanning (MBPS) technique which also makes use of FASTs 19 beam receiver. It is especially sensitive to persistent narrowband signals and it can simultaneously cross-reference  observations in a single observation. Together MBCM and MBPS are two new and powerful observational methods that will greatly enhance the speed of observation processing and conduct more sensitive observations of more celestial objects. 

The paper concludes by musing that the techniques and methods may easily enable the Far Neighbour Project to run for a millennium and for that reason, they refrain from describing exactly how their methods may be implemented across such vast timescales given the pace of technological advancement. Alas to date, no evidence has been acquired for the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence but these new methods must swing the possibility of detection in our favour if, anyone is out there!

Source : SETI at FAST in China

The post China’s FAST Observatory is Playing a Key Role in the Search for Aliens appeared first on Universe Today.

When NASA decided to send the little Ingenuity rotorcraft to Mars on the belly of the Perseverance rover, they weren’t certain of success. Nothing like it had ever been attempted in Mars’ extremely thin atmosphere. Mission planners hoped and planned for a total of five flights, enough for a technology demonstration.

But now, as almost everyone knows, Ingenuity has wildly exceeded NASA’s initial expectations.

NASA’s Ingenuity has racked up important milestones since it detached itself from the Perseverance Rover’s underbelly in April 2021 and got to work. On April 19th, 2021, it became the first aircraft to complete a powered, controlled extraterrestrial flight. Since that day, it has blown away expectations and completed 70 flights.

Its most recent flight was its 70th, far exceeding its planned five flights. But the previous flight, number 69, was the helicopter’s longest. On December 21st, Ingenuity flew about 706 meters, or 2315 feet. That surpassed its previous longest flight, which was 704 meters, or 2,310 feet, in April 2022.

This video shows Ingenuity during its 54th flight on August 3rd, 2023. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/j. Roger

Five feet further might not seem like much. But Ingenuity is operating in a harsh environment that no aircraft has ever flown in before. Mars is extremely cold and dry, which can be good for aircraft on Earth. But it’s not on Earth; it’s flying in Mars’ very thin atmosphere, only about 1% the density of Earth’s. The thin atmosphere makes lift more difficult to generate, though the gravity is weaker, which helps. Not to mention the time delay in communications between Mars and Earth that adds a layer of complexity to every endeavour.

In that context, a 706-meter-long flight is a serious achievement.

The Perseverance Rover’s Mastcam-Z instrument captured this image of NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter on June 15, 2021, the 114th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. The location, “Airfield D” (the fourth airfield), is just east of the “Séítah” geologic unit. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/MSSS.

In total, the 1.8 kg (4 lb) 10 cm (19 inch) tall rotorcraft has flown just under 17 km (10.5 miles) over the Martian surface. It’s spent 127.7 minutes in flight and has climbed as high as about 24 meters (79 ft.) Its 69th and longest flight lasted 135 seconds at speeds as high as 35 km (22 mi) per hour.

These numbers signify a rousing success. Ingenuity has proven the value of having an airborne companion for Mars rovers. An eye in the sky can help plan a rover’s path and can identify intriguing features in need of exploration. Ingenuity is no longer a technology demonstration. Now, NASA is using it as a scout for Perseverance, and the goal is to keep the rotorcraft ahead of the rover. But the successful scouting has led to communication disruptions.

NASA lost contact with Ingenuity back in April 2023 during its 52nd flight. The flight was successful, but NASA lost contact with the tiny rotorcraft as it descended back to the surface to land. The dropout in communications was expected due to an interfering hill between Ingenuity and Perseverance, which handles all of the craft’s communications. Perseverance was busy working on one side of the hill while Ingenuity sat on the other side. After 63 days, the rover crested the hill and could see Ingenuity again, and communications were restored, just as planned.

NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter is seen here next to Perseverance’s tracks in a close-up taken by Mastcam-Z, a pair of zoomable cameras aboard the Perseverance rover. This image was taken on April 5, the 45th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

Ingenuity was never meant to be a working scout, so it’s well outside of its planned mission parameters now. In future missions, these communication dropouts will be avoided as much as possible.

Ingenuity suffered another setback, too, on May 3rd, 2022. Seasonal dust blocked the rotorcraft’s solar arrays, and Ingenuity was unable to fully recharge its batteries. One of the machine’s instruments went into a low-power state and reset its clocks. “When the sun rose the next morning and the solar array began to charge the batteries, the helicopter’s clock was no longer in sync with the clock aboard the rover,” NASA wrote in a statement. “Essentially, when Ingenuity thought it was time to contact Perseverance, the rover’s base station wasn’t listening.”

That communications drop-out didn’t last long, though. NASA personnel instructed Perseverance to continually listen for Ingenuity’s signal until communications were re-established a couple of days later on May 5th.

These hiccups are expected in a technology demonstration mission. By lasting this long and flying so much, and by dealing with communication problems and dust problems, NASA’s learning a lot more than they hoped for. Failures and problems are all a part of it.

And Ingenuity isn’t done yet. It’s survived everything Mars has thrown at it for almost two years. Each successful flight is a huge bonus now.

As the first aircraft on Mars, Ingenuity is a technological trailblazer. Its successors will be based on the many lessons NASA has learned from the little rotorcraft. And if rover design is any template, the aircraft that follow in Ingenuity’s footsteps will be larger, more robust, and more capable.

Mars exploration will never be the same again.

There are plans to send a pair of rotorcraft to Mars in the Mars Sample Return mission. And engineers are already thinking about a Mars Science Helicopter to accompany a future rover mission. It would be much larger and more capable than Ingenuity. It’ll have six rotors and be able to carry several kilograms of scientific payload to study areas inaccessible to rovers.

Artist illustration of three solar-powered Mars helicopters from NASA: Ingenuity (upper right), along with the proposed design for a Sample Recovery Helicopter to be used on the future NASA-ESA Mars Sample Return Mission (foreground) and a concept for a future Science Helicopter (upper center). Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Ingenuity’s success, including its 69th and longest flight, is directly responsible for the future success of other rotorcraft on Mars. And each successive flight creates more data that’ll be used to improve future rotorcraft.

Not only on Mars but elsewhere in the Solar System.

This artist’s impression shows NASA’s Dragonfly soaring over the dunes of Saturn’s moon Titan. NASA has authorized the mission team to proceed on development toward a July 2028 launch date. Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Steve Gribben

The post Ingenuity’s 69th Flight is its Farthest So Far appeared first on Universe Today.

NASA’s Juno spacecraft has been getting closer and closer to Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io with each recent orbit. Juno is in its 57th orbit of Jupiter, and on December 30th, Juno came to within 1500 km (930 miles) of Io’s surface. It’s been more than 20 years since a spacecraft came this close.

The Galileo spacecraft travelled over the moon’s south pole in 2001, coming to within 181 km (112 miles.) Galileo showed us a lot about the nature of Io’s surface.

But Juno is a different spacecraft with more modern instruments and cameras that will fly by Io multiple times. One of the mission’s specific goals is to determine if Io has a magma ocean or not. And while the spacecraft’s suite of scientific instruments can shed light on that question, Juno also carries a powerful camera that rides shotgun: Junocam.

Junocam was included with the spacecraft primarily to satisfy us, the interested public around the world. It takes high-resolution visible light images that are available for anyone to process and share. Two other imagers were also busy during the Io flyby. One is the Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM), which takes images in infrared. The other is the Stellar Reference Unit, which usually takes images of stars for navigation.

Io’s forbidding surface looks almost inviting in this Junocam image processed by Kevin Gill. But don’t be fooled: Io is a volcanic hellscape. If you’d like a phone wallpaper version of this image, Kevin made one here. Image Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SwRI / MSSS / Kevin Gill

Junocam images get the most attention because NASA makes them available for anyone to process and post. Junocam captured six separate images of the volcanic moon, including black and white and colour. The image below is a composite showing the lit and shadowed sides of Io, processed by Hemant Dara.

A composite image of Io showing the shaded and lit portions. Image Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SwRI / MSSS / Hemant Dara © CC BY

Scientists know that Io is the most volcanic body in the Solar System by far. But they hunger for more detailed knowledge of its interior. Juno’s series of flybys will allow researchers to watch its volcanoes over time, which will help lead to some new understandings.

“By combining data from this flyby with our previous observations, the Juno science team is studying how Io’s volcanoes vary,” said Scott Bolton, Juno’s principal investigator and a scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, in a statement issued before this most recent flyby. “We are looking for how often they erupt, how bright and hot they are, how the shape of the lava flow changes, and how Io’s activity is connected to the flow of charged particles in Jupiter’s magnetosphere.”

Io remains volcanic to this day because of its eccentric orbit around Jupiter. Jupiter’s mass squeezes Io, and the squeezing generates heat that drives its volcanoes. The other Galilean moons add to the effect. The tidal force is so strong that Io’s surface can rise and fall by as much as 100 meters.

Io is about the same size as Earth’s Moon, yet it’s covered in hundreds of active volcanoes. Eruptions can launch lava dozens of kilometres above the moon’s surface. There’s so much volcanic activity on the surface of Io that some lava flows are hundreds of kilometres long. These voluminous eruptions are like the ones that triggered mass extinctions here on Earth.

Juno’s next Io flyby will be on February 3rd. During that visit, Juno will also approach about 1500 km (930 miles) above Io’s surface.

“With our pair of close flybys in December and February, Juno will investigate the source of Io’s massive volcanic activity, whether a magma ocean exists underneath its crust, and the importance of tidal forces from Jupiter, which are relentlessly squeezing this tortured moon,” said Bolton.

The JunoCam instrument aboard our #JunoMission acquired six images of Jupiter's moon Io during its close encounter today. This black-and-white view was taken at an altitude of about 1,500 miles (2,500 kilometers). More images will be available soon at https://t.co/mGfITRe57Y pic.twitter.com/9GcamrhxPt

— NASA Solar System (@NASASolarSystem) December 31, 2023

Juno is nearing the end of its mission in 2025. One of the hazards that’s bringing its end is Jupiter’s intense radiation. The spacecraft’s orbits are designed to protect it from Jupiter’s radiation, except when it approaches the planet for closer looks. It has to remove itself from the intense radiation to both extend the life of its electronics and allow it to send data back to Earth.

Juno was designed to withstand only 17 orbits of Jupiter but has so far survived 57. With a few more to come, the mission still has lots to teach us about Io and the Jovian system. No doubt we’ll be gifted more stunning images and science as it completes its mission.

“Io is only one of the celestial bodies which continue to come under Juno’s microscope during this extended mission,” said Juno’s acting project manager, Matthew Johnson of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “As well as continuously changing our orbit to allow new perspectives of Jupiter and flying low over the nightside of the planet, the spacecraft will also be threading the needle between some of Jupiter’s rings to learn more about their origin and composition.”

Io’s primary mission ended in July 2021, and its current extended mission will end in September 2025. At that time, the spacecraft will be sent plunging to its destruction in Jupiter’s atmosphere, ending its nine-year mission.

But these pictures of Io will always be part of its legacy.

The post Juno Makes its Closest Flyby of Io appeared first on Universe Today.