Science

A research team has achieved a significant breakthrough in determining fundamental properties of atomic nuclei. The team conducted laser spectroscopy experiments on muonic helium-3. Muonic helium-3 is a special form of helium in which the atom s two electrons are replaced by a single, much heavier muon.

A research team has achieved a significant breakthrough in determining fundamental properties of atomic nuclei. The team conducted laser spectroscopy experiments on muonic helium-3. Muonic helium-3 is a special form of helium in which the atom s two electrons are replaced by a single, much heavier muon.

Whenever scientists present new research showing potential biosignatures on an exoplanet, follow-up articles spread like ripples on a pond. Mainstream media usually runs with it, which shows how the issue captures people's attention. The issue of life on other worlds is a compelling one. This is what happened recently with the exoplanet K2-18b.

A quantum computer with a million qubits would be able to crack the vital RSA encryption algorithm, and while such machines don't yet exist, that estimate could still fall further

Many people are worried about the health effects of ultra-processed foods and microplastics, but could these two issues actually be linked?

Trump continues to go after Harvard, ostensibly because of its pervasive antisemitism (granted, President Alan Garber says that the climate is still antisemitic and he himself has been a victim). However, Trump is punishing the wrong people for Harvard’s presumed crimes, and those include researchers whose grants have been cut or rescinded.

Now he’s taken an even more egregious step: threatening to ban the school’s ability to accept international students unless it coughs up a pile of information about all of Harvard’s foreign students.  Click the headline from April 17 below to read, or find the article archived here:

An excerpt:

The Trump administration on Thursday said it would halt Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students, taking aim at a crucial funding source for the nation’s oldest and wealthiest college in a major escalation of the administration’s efforts to pressure the elite school to fall in line with the president’s agenda.

The administration notified Harvard about the decision — which could affect about a quarter of the school’s student body — after a back-and-forth in recent weeks over the legality of a sprawling records request as part of the Department of Homeland Security’s investigation, according to three people with knowledge of the negotiations. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

The latest move intensifies the administration’s attempt to upend the culture of higher education by directly subverting the ability of one of the nation’s premier universities to attract the best and brightest students from all over the world. That capability, across all of academia, has long been one of the greatest sources of academic, economic and scientific strength in America.

It is also likely to prompt a second legal challenge from Harvard, according to another person familiar with the school’s thinking who insisted on anonymity to discuss private deliberations. The university sued the Trump administration last month over the government’s attempt to impose changes to its curriculum, admissions policies and hiring practices.

“I am writing to inform you that effective immediately, Harvard University’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification is revoked,” a letter to the university from Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, said. A copy of the letter was obtained by The New York Times.

The Department of Homeland Security said the action applied to current and future students.

“Harvard can no longer enroll foreign students, and existing foreign students must transfer or lose their legal status,” the department said in a news release after Ms. Noem posted the administration’s letter on social media later on Thursday.

Not only that, but current foreign students have to find another place to study, pronto. Do you think that’s easy? And of course Trump has a way to enforce this plan: all he has to do is revoke the visas of foreign students.

Granted, a lot of dosh is involved, as foreign students tend to pay full fare:

The administration’s decision is likely to have a significant effect on the university’s bottom line. Tuition at Harvard is $59,320 for the 2025-26 school year, and costs can rise to nearly $87,000 when room and board are included. International students tend to pay larger shares of education costs compared with other students. (Harvard notes it is need-blind for all students, regardless of nationality.)

You can read the letter from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem here, which lays out what Harvard has to cough up to prevent loss of its foreign students. It was apparently sent to the school

I don’t think Harvard responded by the April 30 deadline, and they have responded this way:

Harvard relayed those concerns to the administration on April 30. On the same day, the university’s executive vice president, Meredith Weenick, issued a public letter that vowed the school would provide the administration only with information “required by law” and urged students to “stay as focused as possible on your academic pursuits.”

The administration responded the following week, notifying Harvard that the school’s response did not satisfy Ms. Noem’s request, the people said. In the same message, the administration appeared to narrow its request by asking for information on international students who met any one of four criteria.

Noem then disqualified Harvard from the student visa program. I have just learned that Harvard has filed a lawsuit over this latest action and has filed a restraining order against the government (you can read the new suit here). I haven’t read it yet,  and though I’m not a lawyer, I think the university has a good case. Harvard is being singled out among all American universities in this way (some are even more antisemitic than Harvard) and the government’s dismissing of foreign applicants has never been done before. I’m not sure whether selective enforcement is grounds to sue, but you can be sure that Harvard will mount a case.

One quarter of Harvard’s students are foreign, and they are essential to Harvard being Harvard. Further, it’s inimical to scholarship to prevent students who want to study at Harvard from coming here, denying the world the ability to send people to an American university renowned for producing brilliant foreign scholars.

This morning, Steve Pinker published a long op-ed in the NYT on the “Harvard derangement syndrome” of the administration. Click on the headline below to read it, or find it archived here:

An excerpt (Steve first mentions all the pieces he’s written criticizing Harvard):

So I’m hardly an apologist for my employer when I say that the invective now being aimed at Harvard has become unhinged. According to its critics, Harvard is a “national disgrace,” a “woke madrasa,” a “Maoist indoctrination camp,” a “ship of fools,” a “bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment,” a “cesspool of extremist riots” and an “Islamist outpost” in which the “dominant view on campus” is “destroy the Jews, and you’ve destroyed the root of Western civilization.”

And that’s before we get to President Trump’s opinion that Harvard is “an Anti-Semitic, Far Left Institution,” a “Liberal mess” and a “threat to Democracy,” which has been “hiring almost all woke, Radical Left, idiots and ‘birdbrains’ who are only capable of teaching FAILURE to students and so-called future leaders.”

This is not just trash talk. On top of its savage slashing of research funding across the board, the Trump administration has singled out Harvard to receive no federal grants at all. Not satisfied with these punishments, the administration just forbade Harvard from enrolling foreign students and has threatened to multiply the tax on its endowment as much as 15-fold, as well as to remove its tax-free nonprofit status.

Call it Harvard Derangement Syndrome. As the country’s oldest, richest and most famous university, Harvard has always attracted outsize attention. In the public imagination the university is both the epitome of higher learning and a natural magnet for grievances against elites.

He admits that Harvard still has problems:

Yet some of the enmity against Harvard has been earned. My colleagues and I have worried for years about the erosion of academic freedom here, exemplified by some notorious persecutions. In 2021 the biologist Carole Hooven was demonized and ostracized, effectively driving her out of Harvard, for explaining in an interview how biology defines male and female. Her cancellation was the last straw that led us to create the academic freedom council, but it was neither the first nor the last.

. . .The most painful indictment of Harvard is its alleged antisemitism — not the old-money WASP snobbery of Oliver Barrett III, but a spillover of anti-Zionist zealotry. A recent, long-awaited report detailed many troubling incidents. Jewish students have felt intimidated by anti-Israel protests that have disrupted classes, ceremonies and everyday campus life, often met with a confused response by the university. Members of the teaching staff have gratuitously injected pro-Palestinian activism into courses or university programming. Many Jewish students, particularly Israelis, reported being ostracized or demonized by their peers.

As with its other maladies, Harvard’s antisemitism has to be considered with a modicum of discernment. Yes, the problems are genuine. But “a bastion of rampant anti-Jew hatred” with the aim of “destroying the Jews as a first step to destroying Western civilization”? Oy gevalt!

I’m glad there’s some Yiddish in there.  He notes that withholding grant money hurts Jews than other groups, and is hypocritical given Trump’s past statements:

Just as clear is what won’twork: the Trump administration’s punitive defunding of science at Harvard. Contrary to a widespread misunderstanding, a federal grant is not alms to the university, nor may the executive branch dangle it to force grantees to do whatever it wants. It is a fee for a service — namely, a research project that the government decides (after fierce competitive review) would benefit the country. The grant pays for the people and equipment needed to carry out that research, which would not be done otherwise.

Mr. Trump’s strangling of this support will harm Jews more than any president in my lifetime. Many practicing and aspiring scientists are Jewish, and his funding embargo has them watching in horror as they are laid off, their labs are shut down or their dreams of a career in science go up in smoke. This is immensely more harmful than walking past a “Globalize the Intifada” sign. Worse still is the effect on the far larger number of gentiles in science, who are being told that their labs and careers are being snuffed out to advance Jewish interests. Likewise for the current patients whose experimental treatments will be halted, and the future patients who may be deprived of cures. None of this is good for the Jews.

The concern for Jews is patently disingenuous, given Mr. Trump’s sympathy for Holocaust deniers and Hitler fans. The obvious motivation is to cripple civil society institutions that serve as loci of influence outside the executive branch. As JD Vance put it in the title of a 2021 speech: “The Universities Are the Enemy.”

Indeed. It’s natural that a populist and delusional President will go after America’s most elite university.

. . . . Why does this matter? For all its foibles, Harvard (together with other universities) has made the world a better place, significantly so. Fifty-two faculty members have won Nobel Prizes and more than 5,800 patents are held by Harvard. Its researchers invented baking powder, the first organ transplant, the programmable computer, the defibrillator, the syphilis test and oral rehydration therapy (a cheap treatment that has saved tens of millions of lives). They developed the theory of nuclear stability that has saved the world from Armageddon. They invented the golf tee and the catcher’s mask. Harvard spawned “Sesame Street,” The National Lampoon, “The Simpsons,” Microsoft and Facebook.

Ongoing research at Harvard includes methane-tracking satellites, robotic catheters, next-generation batteries and wearable robotics for stroke victims. Federal grants are supporting research on metastasis, tumor suppression, radiation and chemotherapy in children, multidrug-resistant infections, pandemic prevention, dementia, anesthesia, toxin reduction in firefighting and the military, the physiological effects of spaceflight and battlefield wound care. Harvard’s technologists are pushing innovations in quantum computing, A.I., nanomaterials, biomechanics, foldable bridges for the military, hack-resistant computer networks and smart living environments for the elderly. One lab has developed what may be a cure for Type 1 diabetes.

Pinker feels that Harvard is capable of reforming itself, and in fact is now doing so. But even if some of the reforms coincide with those demanded by the Trump administration, it’s simply bad for the government to mold universities to its liking. Withholding grants and revoking the visas of foreign students will not cure Harvard of antisemitism.

Trump is violating the third of Haidt and Lukianoff’s “great untruths” which, ironically, are supposed to motivate young people, not universities:

“Life is a battle between good people and evil people.”

Read the whole op-ed, written with Pinker’s typical panache; he concludes that, for Harvard, the “appropriate treatment (as with other imperfect institutions) is to diagnose which parts need which remedies, not to cut its carotid and watch it bleed out.” Sadly, Trump has already wielded the knife.

h/t Greg Mayer

Our nearest neighbor is only slightly smaller than the Earth… but that’s just about the only thing the two planets have in common. Now, a recent NASA-funded study suggests that the interior of Venus may be equally strange as well.

Reader Ephraim Heller sends some lovely photos from his safari in Tanaznia in April 2025. Emphraim’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Today’s photos focus on lions (Panthera leo). [JAC: I especially love this one]:

Puzzlingly, many birds add human-made material to their nests with no obvious function – now there is evidence that these home improvements might ward off predators

The United States’ government is waging an all-out assault on Harvard University. The strategy, so far, has been:

• Cut most of the grants (present and future) for scientific and medical research, so that thousands of Harvard’s scientists, researchers and graduate students have to stop their work indefinitely. That includes research on life-saving medicine, on poorly understood natural phenomena, and on new technology. This also means that the university will have no money from these activities to pay salaries of its employees.
• Eliminate the tax-advantageous status of the university, so that the university is much more expensive to operate.
• Prohibit Harvard from having any international students (undergraduate and graduate) and other researchers, so that large numbers of existing scientific and medical research projects that still have funding will have to cease operation. This destroys the careers of thousands of brilliant people — and not just foreigners. Many US faculty and students are working with and depend upon these expelled researchers, and their work will stop too. It also means that Harvard’s budget for the next academic year will be crushed, since it is far too late to replace the tuition from international undergraduate students for the coming year.

The grounds for this war is that Harvard allegedly does not provide a safe environment for its Jewish students, and that Harvard refuses to let the government determine who it may and may not hire.

Now, maybe you can explain to me what this is really about. I’m confused what crimes these scientific researchers commited that justifies stripping them of their grants and derailing their research. I’m also unclear as to why many apolitical, hard-working young trainees in laboratories across the campus deserve to be ejected from their graduate and post-graduate careers and sent home, delaying or ruining their futures. [Few will be able to transfer to other US schools; with all the government cuts to US science, there’s no money to support them at other locations.] And I don’t really understand how such enormous damage and disruption to the lives and careers of ten thousand-ish scientists, researchers and graduate students at Harvard (including many who are Jewish) will actually improve the atmosphere for Harvard’s Jewish students.

As far as I can see, the government is merely using Jewish students as pawns, pretending to attack Harvard on their behalf while in truth harboring no honest concern for their well-being. The fact that the horrors and nastiness surrounding the Gaza war are being exploited by the government as cover for an assault on academic freedom and scientific research is deeply cynical and exceedingly ugly.

From the outside, where Harvard is highly respected — it is certainly among the top five universities in the world, however you rank them — this must look completely idiotic, as idiotic as France gutting the Sorbonne, or the UK eviscerating Oxford. But keep in mind that Harvard is by no means the only target here. The US government is cutting the country’s world-leading research in science, technology and medicine to the bone. If that’s what you want to do, then ruining Harvard makes perfect sense.

The country that benefits the most from this self-destructive behavior? China, obviously. As a friend of mine said, this isn’t merely like shooting yourself in the foot, it’s like shooting yourself in the head.

I suspect most readers will understand that I cannot blog as usual right now. To write good articles about quantum physics requires concentration and focus. When people’s careers and life’s work are being devastated all around me, that’s simply not possible.

Women seem to be judged as being more moral than men, which could mean they have further to fall if they don't meet societal expectations

Wildlife carers fostering some of Australia’s most precious animals have had to rescue them one by one from rising waters and are now racing to repair fencing that keeps feral predators away

If I am unable to access a vaccine in the future and get a nasty case of COVID, I'll know where to point the finger and so will millions of others.

The post Our Medical Establishment Supports Viral Mandates first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Self-driving cars which eliminate traffic jams, getting a healthcare diagnosis instantly without leaving your home, or feeling the touch of loved ones based across the continent may sound like the stuff of science fiction. But new research could make all this and more a step closer to reality thanks to a radical breakthrough in semiconductor technology.

Self-driving cars which eliminate traffic jams, getting a healthcare diagnosis instantly without leaving your home, or feeling the touch of loved ones based across the continent may sound like the stuff of science fiction. But new research could make all this and more a step closer to reality thanks to a radical breakthrough in semiconductor technology.

A newly discovered silicone variant is a semiconductor, researchers have discovered -- upending assumptions that the material class is exclusively insulating.

Researchers developed a faster, more stable way to simulate the swirling electric fields inside industrial plasmas -- the kind used to make microchips and coat materials. The improved method could lead to better tools for chip manufacturing and fusion research.

Researchers developed a faster, more stable way to simulate the swirling electric fields inside industrial plasmas -- the kind used to make microchips and coat materials. The improved method could lead to better tools for chip manufacturing and fusion research.

Proteins catalyze life by changing shape when they interact with other molecules. The result is a muscle twitching, the perception of light, or a bit of energy extracted from food. The ability to engineer shapeshifting proteins opens new avenues for medicine, agriculture, and beyond.

Engineers developed a membrane that filters the components of crude oil by their molecular size, an advance that could dramatically reduce the amount of energy needed for crude oil fractionation.