Science

federal-firings-could-wreak-havoc-on-great-lakes-fishery

Federal firings could wreak havoc on Great Lakes fishery

Her performance reviews for the last year had been glowing, so the letter made no sense. “It’s not a real explanation,” she said.

The USFWS layoffs will not affect the sea lamprey control program in Canada, McClinchey said. “The Canadian government has assured us that the money from Canada will continue to be there and we’re on track to deliver a full program in Canadian waters,” he said. “That’s great, but this program works because it’s border blind.”

In other words: Cuts to lamprey control in US waters are a threat to fish and fishermen everywhere on the Great Lakes.

Just a week ago, the Great Lakes Fishery Commission faced a more dire staffing situation, as the USFWS informed directors they’d also be unable to hire seasonal workers to spread lampricide come April. Within a few days, that hiring freeze was reversed, said McClinchey.

This reversal gives him a bit of hope. “That at least tells us no one is rooting for the lamprey,” he said.

McClinchey is currently in DC for appropriation season, presenting the commission’s work to members of Congress and defending the agency’s budget. It’s an annual trip, but this year he’s also advocating for the reinstatement of laid-off lamprey control employees.

He is optimistic. “It seems clear to me that it’s important we preserve this program, and so far everyone we’ve encountered thinks that way and are working to that end,” he said.

Cutting back the program isn’t really on the table for the commission. Even minor cuts to scope would be devastating for the fishery, he said.

Even the former USFWS employee from Marquette is remaining hopeful. “I still think that they’re going to scramble to make it happen,” she said. “Because it’s not really an option to just stop treating for a whole season.”

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.

Federal firings could wreak havoc on Great Lakes fishery Read More »

us-antarctic-program-disrupted-by-doge-induced-chaos

US Antarctic Program disrupted by DOGE-induced chaos


Long-term impacts will affect not only research but also geopolitics.

Credit: Wolfgang Kaehler via Getty

Few agencies have been spared as Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has ripped through the United States federal government. Even in Antarctica, scientists and workers are feeling the impacts—and are terrified for what’s to come.

The United States Antarctic Program (USAP) operates three permanent stations in Antarctica. These remote stations are difficult to get to and difficult to maintain; scattered across the continent, they are built on volcanic hills, polar plateaus, and icy peninsulas.

But to the US, the science has been worth it. At these stations, over a thousand people each year come to the continent to live and work. Scientists operate a number of major research projects, studying everything from climate change and rising sea levels to the cosmological makeup and origins of the universe itself. With funding cuts and layoffs looming, Antarctic scientists and experts don’t know if their research will be able to continue, how US stations will be sustained, or what all this might mean for the continent’s delicate geopolitics.

“Even brief interruptions will result in people walking away and not coming back,” says Nathan Whitehorn, an associate professor and Antarctic scientist at Michigan State University. “It could easily take decades to rebuild.”

The USAP is managed by the National Science Foundation. Last week, a number of NSF program managers staffed on Antarctic projects were fired as part of a wider purge at the agency. The program managers are critical for maintaining communication with the infrastructure and logistics arm of the NSF, and the contractors for the USAP, as well as planning deployment for scientists to the continent, keeping track of the budgets, and funding the maintenance and operations work. “I have no idea what we do without them,” says another Antarctic scientist who has spent time on the continent, who along with several others WIRED granted anonymity due to fears of retaliation.

“Without them, everything stops,” says a scientist whose NSF project manager was fired last week. “I have no idea who I am supposed to report to now or what happens to submitted proposals.”

Scientific research happens at all of the stations. At the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, scientists work on the South Pole Telescope and BICEP telescope, both of which study the cosmic background radiation and the evolution of the universe; IceCube, a cubic-kilometer detector designed to study neutrino physics and high energy emission from astrophysical sources; and the Atmospheric Research Observatory that studies climate science and is run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (Mass firings are also expected at the NOAA.)

“The climate science [at the South Pole Station] is super unique,” an Antarctic scientist says. “The site has so little pollution that we call it ‘the cleanest air on Earth,’ and they have been monitoring the ozone layer and CO2 content in the atmosphere for many decades.”

Other directives from the Donald Trump administration have directly affected daily life on those stations. “Gender-inclusive terms on housing documents” have been removed from Antarctic staffer forms, a source familiar with the situation at McMurdo Station tells WIRED. “It asked if you had a preference with which gender you housed with,” the source says. “That’s all been removed.”

Staffers have already pushed back. “People have been painting waste bins saying “Antarctica is for ALL” in rainbow, people’s email signatures [have] pride additions, [others] keep adding preferred pronouns to emails,” the source says.

“There’s a sense of unease on the station like people have never felt before,” they add. “The job still has to get done, even though people feel like the next shoe can drop at any moment.”

That unease extends to their own job security. “There are some people currently at the South Pole that are worried about losing their jobs any day now,” a source with familiarity of the situation tells WIRED. Workers present at the station aren’t able to physically leave until October, and a midseason firing, or loss of funding, would present a unique set of challenges.

Sources are also bracing for at least a 50 percent reduction in the NSF’s budget due to DOGE cuts. These cuts are sending Antarctic scientists with assistants and graduate students scrambling. “We didn’t know if we could pay graduate students,” says one scientist. While research is conducted on the continent, scientists bring their findings back to the US to process and analyze. A lot of the funding also operates the science itself: For one project that requires electricity to run detectors, the scientist “was paranoid we would not be able to literally pay bills for an experiment starved for data.” That hasn’t come to fruition yet, but as funding cycles restart in the coming weeks and months, scientists are on tenterhooks.

Sources tell WIRED that Germany, Canada, Spain, and China have already started taking advantage of that uncertainty by recruiting US scientists focused on Antarctica.

“Foreign countries are actively recruiting my colleagues, and some have already left,” says one Antarctic scientist. “My students are looking at jobs overseas now … people have been coming [to the US] to do science my whole life. Now people are going the other way.”

“Now is a great time to see if anyone wants to jump ship,” another Antarctic scientist says. “I do worry about a brain drain of tenured academics, or students who are shunted out.”

“The damage caused by gutting the [Antarctic] science budget like this is going to last generations,” says another.

Throughout DOGE’s cuts to the federal government, representatives have said that if something needs to be brought back, it could be. In some cases, reversals have already happened: The US Department of Agriculture said it accidentally fired staffers working on preventing the spread of bird flu and is trying to rehire them.

But in Antarctica, a reversal won’t necessarily work. “One of the really scary things about this is that if the Antarctic program budget is cut, then they’ll very quickly get to the point where they can’t even keep the station open, much less science projects going,” an Antarctic scientist tells WIRED. “If the South Pole [station] is shut down, it’s basically nearly impossible to bring it back up. Everything will freeze and get buried in snow. And some other country will likely immediately take over.

Others share this fear of a station takeover. “Even if science funding is cut back, there is an urgent need for the US to invest in icebreakers and polar airlift capability otherwise at some point the US-managed South Pole station might not be serviceable,” says Klaus Dodds, an Antarctic expert and professor of geopolitics at Royal Holloway University of London.

Experts are concerned that countries like Russia and China—who have already been eagle-eyed on continental influence—will quickly jostle to fill the power vacuum. “Presumably it would be humiliating for anyone who wishes to promote ‘America First’ to witness China offer to take over the occupation and management of the base at the heart of Antarctica. China is a very determined polar power,” says Dodds.

The political outcome of the US pulling back from its Antarctic research and presence could be dire, sources tell WIRED.

Antarctica isn’t owned by any one country. Instead it’s governed by the Antarctic Treaty System, which protects Antarctica and the scientific research taking place on the continent, and forbids mining and nuclear activity. Some countries, including China and Russia, have indicated that they would be interested in rule changes to the Treaty system, particularly around resource extraction and fishing restrictions. The US, traditionally, has played a key role in championing the treaty: “Many of the leading polar scientists and social scientists are either US citizens and/or have been enriched by contact with US-led programs,” says Dodds.

That leadership role could change quickly. The US also participates in a number of international collaborations involving major Antarctic scientific projects. A US pullback, Whitehorn says, “makes it very hard to regard the US as a reliable partner, so I think there will be a lot less interest in accepting US leadership in such things … The uncertainty will drive people away and sacrifice the leadership the US already has.”

“If the NSF can’t function, or we don’t fund it, projects with long lead times can just die,” another scientist says. “I’m sure international partners would be happy to partner elsewhere. This is what it means to lose US competitiveness.”

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

Photo of WIRED

Wired.com is your essential daily guide to what’s next, delivering the most original and complete take you’ll find anywhere on innovation’s impact on technology, science, business and culture.

US Antarctic Program disrupted by DOGE-induced chaos Read More »

did-the-snowball-earth-give-complex-life-a-boost?

Did the snowball Earth give complex life a boost?

Life is complex

But when new minerals made their way to the water, what did they actually do? Cycle throughout the bottom of the ocean, delivering new elements to previously barren locations and providing energy for microbial life. At the end of the Cryogenic, these early lifeforms appear to have gotten gradually more complex, paving the way for the first known multicellular life in the ensuing Ediacaran.

“Any time there’s a really radical environmental shift, we know that’s an interesting time for evolution,” says Chris Kempes, a theoretical biophysicist at the Sante Fe Institute who was not involved in the research. For example, when temperatures drop or less sunlight is available, organisms’ speed and metabolic rates generally slow down, creating new pressures on life, Kempes’ research has found. Halverson thinks the extreme habitats that life had to endure during the snowballs played more of a role in shaping evolution than the nutrient flushes from glaciers.

Even so, studies like Kirkland’s that try to understand how nutrients and energy availability changed throughout history are “the key to understanding when and why there are major evolutionary transitions,” Kempes says.

To determine what other minerals may have been key players in the ancient oceans, Kirkland hopes to look at rocks called apatites, which contain oxygen and other elements like strontium and phosphorus. However, these break down much easier than zircon-rich rocks, meaning they are less stable through long stretches of time.

Though the global changes of the Cryogenic happened eons ago, Kirkland sees parallels with the wide-scale climate changes of today. “The atmosphere, the land, and the oceans are all interconnected,” he says. “Understanding these [ancient] cycles gives us information about how more modern cycles on the planet may work.”

Geology, 2025.  DOI:  10.1130/G52887.1

Hannah Richter is a freelance science journalist and graduate of MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing. She primarily covers environmental science and astronomy. 

Did the snowball Earth give complex life a boost? Read More »

spacex-readies-a-redo-of-last-month’s-ill-fated-starship-test-flight

SpaceX readies a redo of last month’s ill-fated Starship test flight


The FAA has cleared SpaceX to launch Starship’s eighth test flight as soon as Monday.

Ship 34, destined to launch on the next Starship test flight, test-fired its engines in South Texas on February 12. Credit: SpaceX

SpaceX plans to launch the eighth full-scale test flight of its enormous Starship rocket as soon as Monday after receiving regulatory approval from the Federal Aviation Administration.

The test flight will be a repeat of what SpaceX hoped to achieve on the previous Starship launch in January, when the rocket broke apart and showered debris over the Atlantic Ocean and Turks and Caicos Islands. The accident prevented SpaceX from completing many of the flight’s goals, such as testing Starship’s satellite deployment mechanism and new types of heat shield material.

Those things are high on the to-do list for Flight 8, set to lift off at 5: 30 pm CST (6: 30 pm EST; 23: 30 UTC) Monday from SpaceX’s Starbase launch facility on the Texas Gulf Coast. Over the weekend, SpaceX plans to mount the rocket’s Starship upper stage atop the Super Heavy booster already in position on the launch pad.

The fully stacked rocket will tower 404 feet (123.1 meters) tall. Like the test flight on January 16, this launch will use a second-generation, Block 2, version of Starship with larger propellant tanks with 25 percent more volume than previous vehicle iterations. The payload compartment near the ship’s top is somewhat smaller than the payload bay on Block 1 Starships.

This block upgrade moves SpaceX closer to attempting more challenging things with Starship, such as returning the ship, or upper stage, back to the launch site from orbit. It will be caught with the launch tower at Starbase, just like SpaceX accomplished last year with the Super Heavy booster. Officials also want to bring Starship into service to launch Starlink Internet satellites and demonstrate in-orbit refueling, an enabling capability for future Starship flights to the Moon and Mars.

NASA has contracts with SpaceX worth more than $4 billion to develop a Starship spinoff as a human-rated Moon lander for the Artemis lunar program. The mega-rocket is central to Elon Musk’s ambition to create a human settlement on Mars.

Another shot at glory

Other changes introduced on Starship Version 2 include redesigned forward flaps, which are smaller and closer to the tip of the ship’s nose to better protect them from the scorching heat of reentry. Technicians also removed some of the ship’s thermal protection tiles to “stress-test vulnerable areas” of the vehicle during descent. SpaceX is experimenting with metallic tile designs, including one with active cooling, that might be less brittle than the ceramic tiles used elsewhere on the ship.

Engineers also installed rudimentary catch fittings on the ship to evaluate how they respond to the heat of reentry, when temperatures outside the vehicle climb to 2,600° Fahrenheit (1,430° Celsius). Read more about Starship Version in this previous story from Ars.

It will take about 1 hour and 6 minutes for Starship to fly from the launch pad in South Texas to a splashdown zone in the Indian Ocean northwest of Australia. The rocket’s Super Heavy booster will fire 33 methane-fueled Raptor engines for two-and-a-half minutes as it climbs east from the Texas coastline, then jettison from the Starship upper stage and reverse course to return to Starbase for another catch with mechanical arms on the launch tower.

Meanwhile, Starship will ignite six Raptor engines and accelerate to a speed just shy of orbital velocity, putting the ship on a trajectory to reenter the atmosphere after soaring about halfway around the world.

Booster 15 perched on the launch mount at Starbase, Texas. Credit: SpaceX

If you’ve watched the last few Starship flights, this profile probably sounds familiar. SpaceX achieved successful splashdowns after three Starship test flights last year, and hoped to do it again before the premature end of Flight 7 in January. Instead, the accident was the most significant technical setback for the Starship program since the first full-scale test flight in 2023, which damaged the launch pad before the rocket spun out of control in the upper atmosphere.

Now, SpaceX hopes to get back on track. At the end of last year, company officials said they targeted as many as 25 Starship flights in 2025. Two months in, SpaceX is about to launch its second Starship of the year.

The breakup of Starship last month prevented SpaceX from evaluating the performance of the ship’s Pez-like satellite deployer and upgraded heat shield. Engineers are eager to see how those perform on Monday’s flight. Once in space, the ship will release four simulators replicating the approximate size and mass of SpaceX’s next-generation Starlink Internet satellites. They will follow the same suborbital trajectory as Starship and reenter the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean.

That will be followed by a restart of a Raptor engine on Starship in space, repeating a feat first achieved on Flight 6 in November. Officials want to ensure Raptor engines can reignite reliably in space before actually launching Starship into a stable orbit, where the ship must burn an engine to guide itself back into the atmosphere for a controlled reentry. With another suborbital flight on tap Monday, the engine relight is purely a confidence-building demonstration and not critical for a safe return to Earth.

The flight plan for Starship’s next launch includes another attempt to catch the Super Heavy booster with the launch tower, a satellite deployment demonstration, and an important test of its heat shield. Credit: SpaceX

Then, about 47 minutes into the mission, Starship will plunge back into the atmosphere. If this flight is like the previous few, expect to see live high-definition video streaming back from Starship as super-heated plasma envelops the vehicle in a cloak of pink and orange. Finally, air resistance will slow the ship below the speed of sound, and just 20 seconds before reaching the ocean, the rocket will flip to a vertical orientation and reignite its Raptor engines again to brake for splashdown.

This is where SpaceX hopes Starship Version 2 will shine. Although three Starships have made it to the ocean intact, the scorching temperatures of reentry damaged parts of their heat shields and flaps. That won’t do for SpaceX’s vision of rapidly reusing Starship with minimal or no refurbishment. Heat shield repairs slowed down the turnaround time between NASA’s space shuttle missions, and officials hope the upgraded heat shield on Starship Version 2 will decrease the downtime.

FAA’s green light

The FAA confirmed Friday it issued a launch license earlier this week for Starship Flight 8.

“The FAA determined SpaceX met all safety, environmental and other licensing requirements for the suborbital test flight,” an FAA spokesperson said in a statement.

The federal regulator oversaw a SpaceX-led investigation into the failure of Flight 7. SpaceX said NASA, the National Transportation Safety Board, and the US Space Force also participated in the investigation, which determined that propellant leaks and fires in an aft compartment, or attic, of Starship led to the shutdown of its engines and eventual breakup.

Engineers concluded the leaks were most likely caused by a harmonic response several times stronger than predicted, suggesting the vibrations during the ship’s climb into space were in resonance with the vehicle’s natural frequency. This would have intensified the vibrations beyond the levels engineers expected from ground testing.

Earlier this month, SpaceX completed an extended-duration static fire of the next Starship upper stage to test hardware modifications at multiple engine thrust levels. According to SpaceX, findings from the static fire informed changes to the fuel feed lines to Starship’s Raptor engines, adjustments to propellant temperatures, and a new operating thrust for the next test flight.

“To address flammability potential in the attic section on Starship, additional vents and a new purge system utilizing gaseous nitrogen are being added to the current generation of ships to make the area more robust to propellant leakage,” SpaceX said. “Future upgrades to Starship will introduce the Raptor 3 engine, reducing the attic volume and eliminating the majority of joints that can leak into this volume.”

FAA officials were apparently satisfied with all of this. The agency’s commercial spaceflight division completed a “comprehensive safety review” and determined Starship can return to flight operations while the investigation into the Flight 7 failure remains open. This isn’t new. The FAA also used this safety determination to expedite SpaceX launch license approvals last year as officials investigated mishaps on Starship and Falcon 9 rocket flights.

Photo of Stephen Clark

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

SpaceX readies a redo of last month’s ill-fated Starship test flight Read More »

mars’-polar-ice-cap-is-slowly-pushing-its-north-pole-inward

Mars’ polar ice cap is slowly pushing its north pole inward

The orbiters that carried the radar hardware, along with one or two others, have been orbiting long enough that any major changes in Mars’ gravity caused by ice accumulation or crustal displacement would have shown up in their orbital behavior. The orbital changes they do see, “indicates that the increase in the gravitational potential associated with long-term ice accumulation is higher than the decrease in gravitational potential from downward deflection.” They calculate that the deformation has to be less than 0.13 millimeters per year to be consistent with the gravitational signal.

Finally, the model had to have realistic conditions at the polar ice cap, with a density consistent with a mixture of ice and dust.

Out of those 84 models, only three were consistent with all of these constraints. All three had a very viscous Martian interior, consistent with a relatively cold interior. That’s not a surprise, given what we’ve already inferred about Mars’ history. But it also suggests that most of the radioactive elements that provide heat to the red planet are in the crust, rather than deeper in the interior. That’s something we might have been able to check, had InSight’s temperature measurement experiment deployed correctly. But as it is, we’ll have to wait until some unidentified future mission to get a picture of Mars’ heat dynamics.

In any case, the models also suggest that Mars’ polar ice cap is less than 10 million years old, consistent with the orbitally driven climate models.

In a lot of ways, the new information is an update of earlier attempts to model the Martian interior, given a few more years of orbital data and the information gained from the InSight lander, which also determined the thickness of Mars’ crust and size of its core. But it’s also a good way of understanding how scientists can take bits and pieces of information from seemingly unrelated sources and build them into a coherent picture.

Nature, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-08565-9  (About DOIs).

Mars’ polar ice cap is slowly pushing its north pole inward Read More »

research-roundup:-7-cool-science-stories-from-february

Research roundup: 7 cool science stories from February


Dancing sea turtles, the discovery of an Egyptian pharaoh’s tomb, perfectly boiled eggs, and more.

X-ray image of the PHerc.172 scroll Credit: Vesuvius Challenge

It’s a regrettable reality that there is never time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across each month. In the past, we’ve featured year-end roundups of cool science stories we (almost) missed. This year, we’re experimenting with a monthly collection. February’s list includes dancing sea turtles, the secret to a perfectly boiled egg, the latest breakthrough in deciphering the Herculaneum scrolls, the discovery of an Egyptian pharaoh’s tomb, and more.

Dancing sea turtles

There is growing evidence that certain migratory animal species (turtles, birds, some species of fish) are able to exploit the Earth’s magnetic field for navigation, using it both as a compass to determine direction and as a kind of “map” to track their geographical position while migrating. A paper published in the journal Nature offers evidence of a possible mechanism for this unusual ability, at least in loggerhead sea turtles, who perform an energetic “dance” when they follow magnetic fields to a tasty snack.

Sea turtles make impressive 8,000-mile migrations across oceans and tend to return to the same feeding and nesting sites. The authors believe they achieve this through their ability to remember the magnetic signature of those areas and store them in a mental map. To test that hypothesis, the scientists placed juvenile sea turtles into two large tanks of water outfitted with large coils to create magnetic signatures at specific locations within the tanks. One tank features such a location that had food; the other had a similar location without food.

They found that the sea turtles in the first tank performed distinctive “dancing” moves when they arrived at the area associated with food: tilting their bodies, dog-paddling, spinning in place, or raising their head near or above the surface of the water. When they ran a second experiment using different radio frequencies, they found that the change interfered with the turtles’ internal compass, and they could not orient themselves while swimming. The authors concluded that this is compelling evidence that the sea turtles can distinguish between magnetic fields, possibly relying on complex chemical reactions, i.e., “magnetoreception.” The map sense, however, likely relies on a different mechanism.

Nature, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-08554-y  (About DOIs).

Long-lost tomb of Thutmose II

Archaeologists found a simple tomb near Luxor and identified it as the 3,500-year-old burial site of King Thutmose II.

Archaeologists found a simple tomb near Luxor and identified it as the 3,500-year-old burial site of King Thutmose II. Credit: Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities

Thutmose II was the fourth pharaoh of the Tutankhamun (18th) dynasty. He reigned only about 13 years and married his half-sister Hatshepsut (who went on to become the sixth pharaoh in the dynasty). Archaeologists have now confirmed that a tomb built underneath a waterfall in the mountains in Luxor and discovered in 2022 is the final resting place of Thutmose II. It’s the last of the 18th dynasty royal tombs to be found, more than a century after Tutankhamun’s tomb was found in 1922.

When it was first found, archaeologists thought the tomb might be that of a king’s wife, given its close proximity to Hatshepsut’s tomb and those of the wives of Thutmose III. But they found fragments of alabaster vases inscribed with Thutmose II’s name, along with scraps of religious burial texts and plaster fragments on the partially intact ceiling with traces of blue paint and yellow stars—typically only found in kings’ tombs. Something crucial was missing, however: the actual mummy and grave goods of Thutmose II.

It’s long been assumed that the king’s mummy was discovered in the 19th century at another site called Deir el-Bahari. But archaeologist Piers Litherland, who headed the British team that discovered the tomb, thinks that identification was in error. An inscription stated that Hatshepsut had the tomb’s contents relocated due to flooding. Litherland believes the pharaoh’s actual mummy is buried in a second tomb. Confirmation (or not) of his hypothesis won’t come until after archaeologists finish excavating what he thinks is the site of that second tomb, which is currently buried under multiple layers of rock and plaster.

Hidden images in Pollock paintings

“Troubled Queen” reveals a “hidden” figure, possibly a soldier. Credit: D.A. Morrissette et al., CNS Spectrums 2025

Physicists have long been fascinated by the drip paintings of “splatter master” Jackson Pollock, pondering the presence of fractal patterns (or lack thereof), as well as the presence of curls and coils in his work and whether the artist deliberately exploited a well-known fluid dynamics effect to achieve them—or deliberately avoided them. Now psychiatrists are getting into the game, arguing in a paper published in CNS Spectrums that Pollock—known to incorporate images into his early pre-drip paintings—also used many of the same images repeatedly in his later abstract drip paintings.

People have long claimed to see images in those drip paintings, but the phenomenon is usually dismissed by art critics as a trick of human perception, much like the fractal edges of Rorschach ink blots can fool the eye and mind. The authors of this latest paper analyzed Pollock’s early painting “Troubled Queen” and found multiple images incorporated into the painting, which they believe establishes a basis for their argument that Pollock also incorporated such images into his later drip painting, albeit possibly subconsciously.

“Seeing an image once in a drip painting could be random,” said co-author Stephen M. Stahl of the University of California, San Diego. “Seeing the same image twice in different paintings could be a coincidence. Seeing it three or more times—as is the case for booze bottles, monkeys and gorillas, elephants, and many other subjects and objects in Pollock’s paintings—makes those images very unlikely to be randomly provoked perceptions without any basis in reality.”

CNS Spectrums, 2025. DOI: 10.1017/S1092852924001470

Solving a fluid dynamics mystery

Soap opera in the maze: Geometry matters in Marangoni flows.

Every fall, the American Physical Society exhibits a Gallery of Fluid Motion, which recognizes the innate artistry of images and videos derived from fluid dynamics research. Several years ago, physicists at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) submitted an entry featuring a pool of red dye, propelled by a few drops of soap acting as a surfactant, that seemed to “know” how to solve a maze whose corridors were filled with milk. This is unusual since one would expect the dye to diffuse more uniformly. The team has now solved that puzzle, according to a paper published in Physical Review Letters.

The key factor is surface tension, specifically a phenomenon known as the Marangoni effect, which also drives the “coffee ring effect” and the “tears of wine” phenomenon. If you spread a thin film of water on your kitchen counter and place a single drop of alcohol in the center, you’ll see the water flow outward, away from the alcohol. The difference in their alcohol concentrations creates a surface tension gradient, driving the flow.

In the case of the UCSB experiment, the soap reduces local surface tension around the red dye to set the dye in motion. There are also already surfactants in the milk that work in combination with the soapy surfactant to “solve” the maze. The milk surfactants create varying points of resistance as the dye makes its way through the maze. A dead end or a small space will have more resistance, redirecting the dye toward routes with less resistance—and ultimately to the maze’s exit. “That means the added surfactant instantly knows the layout of the maze,” said co-author Paolo Luzzatto-Fegiz.

Physical Review Letters, 2025. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1802831115

How to cook a perfectly boiled egg

Credit: YouTube/Epicurious

There’s more than one way to boil an egg, whether one likes it hard-boiled, soft-boiled, or somewhere in between. The challenge is that eggs have what physicists call a “two-phase” structure: The yolk cooks at 65° Celsius, while the white (albumen) cooks at 85° Celsius. This often results in overcooked yolks or undercooked whites when conventional methods are used. Physicists at the Italian National Research Council think they’ve cracked the case: The perfectly cooked egg is best achieved via a painstaking process called “periodic cooking,” according to a paper in the journal Communications Engineering.

They started with a few fluid dynamics simulations to develop a method and then tested that method in the laboratory. The process involves transferring a cooking egg every two minutes—for 32 minutes—between a pot of boiling water (100° Celsius) and a bowl of cold water (30° Celsius). They compared their periodically cooked eggs with traditionally prepared hard-boiled and soft-boiled eggs, as well as eggs prepared using sous vide. The periodically cooked eggs ended up with soft yolks (typical of sous vide eggs) and a solidified egg white with a consistency between sous vide and soft-boiled eggs. Chemical analysis showed the periodically cooked eggs also contained more healthy polyphenols. “Periodic cooking clearly stood out as the most advantageous cooking method in terms of egg nutritional content,” the authors concluded.

Communications Engineering, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s44172-024-00334-w

More progress on deciphering Herculaneum scrolls

X-ray scans and AI reveal the inside of ancient scroll

X-ray scans and AI reveal the inside of an ancient scroll. Credit: Vesuvius Challenge

The Vesuvius Challenge is an ongoing project that employs “digital unwrapping” and crowd-sourced machine learning to decipher the first letters from previously unreadable ancient scrolls found in an ancient Roman villa at Herculaneum. The 660-plus scrolls stayed buried under volcanic mud until they were excavated in the 1700s from a single room that archaeologists believe held the personal working library of an Epicurean philosopher named Philodemus. The badly singed, rolled-up scrolls were so fragile that it was long believed they would never be readable, as even touching them could cause them to crumble.

In 2023, the Vesuvius Challenge made its first award for deciphering the first letters, and last year, the project awarded the grand prize of $700,000 for producing the first readable text. The latest breakthrough is the successful generation of the first X-ray image of the inside of a scroll (PHerc. 172) housed in Oxford University’s Bodleian Libraries—a collaboration with the Vesuvius Challenge. The scroll’s ink has a unique chemical composition, possibly containing lead, which means it shows up more clearly in X-ray scans than other Herculaneum scrolls that have been scanned.

The machine learning aspect of this latest breakthrough focused primarily on detecting the presence of ink, not deciphering the characters or text. Oxford scholars are currently working to interpret the text. The first word to be translated was the Greek word for “disgust,” which appears twice in nearby columns of text. Meanwhile, the Vesuvius Challenge collaborators continue to work to further refine the image to make the characters even more legible and hope to digitally “unroll” the scroll all the way to the end, where the text likely indicates the title of the work.

What ancient Egyptian mummies smell like

mummified bodies in the exhibition area of the Egyptian museum in Cairo.

Mummified bodies in the exhibition area of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Credit: Emma Paolin

Much of what we know about ancient Egyptian embalming methods for mummification comes from ancient texts, but there are very few details about the specific spices, oils, resins, and other ingredients used. Science can help tease out the secret ingredients. For instance, a 2018 study analyzed organic residues from a mummy’s wrappings with gas chromatography-mass spectrometry and found that the wrappings were saturated with a mixture of plant oil, an aromatic plant extract, a gum or sugar, and heated conifer resin. Researchers at University College London have now identified the distinctive smells associated with Egyptian mummies—predominantly”woody,” “spicy,” and “sweet,” according to a paper published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

The team coupled gas chromatography with mass spectrometry to measure chemical molecules emitted by nine mummified bodies on display at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and then asked a panel of trained human “sniffers” to describe the samples smells, rating them by quality, intensity, and pleasantness. This enabled them to identify whether a given odor molecule came from the mummy itself, conservation products, pesticides, or the body’s natural deterioration. The work offers additional clues into the materials used in mummification, as well as making it possible for the museum to create interactive “smellscapes” in future displays so visitors can experience the scents as well as the sights of ancient Egyptian mummies.

Journal of the American Chemical Society, 2025. DOI: 10.1021/jacs.4c15769

Photo of Jennifer Ouellette

Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban.

Research roundup: 7 cool science stories from February Read More »

astroscale-aced-the-world’s-first-rendezvous-with-a-piece-of-space-junk

Astroscale aced the world’s first rendezvous with a piece of space junk

Astroscale’s US subsidiary won a $25.5 million contract from the US Space Force in 2023 to build a satellite refueler that can hop around geostationary orbit. Like the ADRAS-J mission, this project is a public-private partnership, with Astroscale committing $12 million of its own money. In January, the Japanese government selected Astroscale for a contract worth up to $80 million to demonstrate chemical refueling in low-Earth orbit.

The latest win for Astroscale came Thursday, when the Japanese Ministry of Defense awarded the company a contract to develop a prototype satellite that could fly in geostationary orbit and collect information on other objects in the domain for Japan’s military and intelligence agencies.

“We are very bullish on the prospects for defense-related business,” said Nobu Matsuyama, Astroscale’s chief financial officer.

Astroscale’s other projects include a life extension mission for an unidentified customer in geostationary orbit, providing a similar service as Northrop Grumman’s Mission Extension Vehicle (MEV).

So, can Astroscale really do all of this? In an era of a militarized final frontier, it’s easy to see the usefulness of sidling up next to a “non-cooperative” satellite—whether it’s to refuel it, repair it, de-orbit it, inspect it, or (gasp!) disable it. Astroscale’s demonstration with ADRAS-J showed it can safely operate near another object in space without navigation aids, which is foundational to any of these applications.

So far, governments are driving demand for this kind of work.

Astroscale raised nearly $400 million in venture capital funding before going public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange last June. After quickly spiking to nearly $1 billion, the company’s market valuation has dropped to about $540 million as of Thursday. Astroscale has around 590 full-time employees across all its operating locations.

Matsuyama said Astroscale’s total backlog is valued at about 38.9 billion yen, or $260 million. The company is still in a ramp-up phase, reporting operating losses on its balance sheet and steep research and development spending that Matsuyama said should max out this year.

“We are the only company that has proved RPO technology for non-cooperative objects, like debris, in space,” Okada said last month.

“In simple terms, this means approach and capture of objects,” Okada continued. “This capability did not exist before us, but one’s mastering of this technology enables you to provide not only debris removal service, but also orbit correction, refueling, inspection, observation, and eventually repair and reuse services.”

Astroscale aced the world’s first rendezvous with a piece of space junk Read More »

single-fiber-computer-could-one-day-track-your-health

Single-fiber computer could one day track your health

Imagine heading out for a run on a cold winter day clad in athletic gear with sensors and microelectronics woven into the very fiber to constantly monitor your vital signs, even running the occasional app. MIT scientists have manufactured a single fiber computer embedded with all the components to do just that, according to a new paper published in the journal Nature.

“Our bodies broadcast gigabytes of data through the skin every second in the form of heat, sound, biochemicals, electrical potentials, and light, all of which carry information about our activities, emotions, and health,” said co-author Yoel Fink, a materials scientist and engineer at MIT. “Unfortunately, most if not all of it gets absorbed and then lost in the clothes we wear. Wouldn’t it be great if we could teach clothes to capture, analyze, store, and communicate this important information in the form of valuable health and activity insights?”

As previously reported, consumers scooped up more than 100 million units of such wearable devices as smartwatches, fitness trackers, augmented reality glasses, and similar tech in the first quarter of 2021 alone. Sales in the category increased 34.4 percent in the second quarter from Q2 2020, making it one of the fastest-growing categories of personal electronics. But while these devices do produce useful data, there are drawbacks. They can be heavy, uncomfortable when worn for long periods, and inaccurate since they usually only measure bodily signals from one spot (e.g., the wrist, chest, or finger).

A fiber computer woven into apparel, by contrast, could monitor sensors and collect data from many points distributed across the body, according to the authors. In 2021, Fink’s group successfully created the first fiber, sewn into a shirt, with the ability to digitally sense, store, and analyze a person’s activity. Until then, electronic fibers had been analog. Hundreds of square silicone microchips were embedded in a polymer preform to create the fiber, and by controlling the polymer flow during manufacture, the team was able to ensure continuous electrical connection among the microchips in a fiber tens of meters long.

The resulting fiber was thin, flexible, easily sewn into fabrics, and washable and could incorporate optical diodes, memory units, sensors, and other components. As proof of principle, Fink’s team stored a 767-kilobit short movie file and a 0.48 megabyte music file in the fiber, envisioning a day when one could store one’s wedding playlist in the bride’s gown (or groom’s tuxedo).

Single-fiber computer could one day track your health Read More »

amazon-uses-quantum-“cat-states”-with-error-correction

Amazon uses quantum “cat states” with error correction


The company shows off a mix of error-resistant hardware and error correction.

Following up on Microsoft’s announcement of a qubit based on completely new physics, Amazon is publishing a paper describing a very different take on quantum computing hardware. The system mixes two different types of qubit hardware to improve the stability of the quantum information they hold. The idea is that one type of qubit is resistant to errors, while the second can be used for implementing an error-correction code that catches the problems that do happen.

While there have been more effective demonstrations of error correction in the past, a number of companies are betting that Amazon’s general approach is the best route to getting logical qubits that are capable of complex algorithms. So, in that sense, it’s an important proof of principle.

Herding cats

The basic idea behind Amazon’s approach is to use one type of qubit to hold data and a second to enable error correction. The data qubit is extremely resistant to one type of error, but prone to a second. Those errors are where the second type of qubit comes in; it’s used to run an error-correction code that’s effective at picking up the problems the data qubits are prone to. Combined, the two are hoped to allow error correction to be handled by far fewer hardware qubits.

In a standard computer, there’s really only one type of error to worry about: a bit that no longer holds the value it was set to. This is called a bit flip, since the value goes from either zero to one, or one to zero. As with most things quantum computing, things are considerably more complicated with qubits. Since they don’t hold binary values, but rather probabilities, you can’t just flip the value of the qubit. Instead, bit flips in quantum land involve inverting the probabilities—going from 60: 40 to 40: 60 or similar.

But bit flips aren’t the only problems that can occur. Qubits can also suffer from what are called phase flip errors. These have no equivalent in classical computers, but they can also keep quantum computers from operating as expected.

In the past, Amazon demonstrated qubits that made it trivially easy to detect when a bit flip error occurred. For the new work, they moved on to something different: a qubit that greatly reduces the probability of bit flip errors.

They do this by using what are called “cat qubits,” after the famed Schrödinger’s cat, which existed in two states at once. While most qubits are based on a single quantum object being placed in this sort of superposition of states, a cat qubit has a collection of objects in a single superposition. (Put differently, the superposition state is distributed across the collection of objects.) In the case of the cat qubits demonstrated so far by companies like Alice and Bob, the objects are photons, which are all held in a single resonator, and Amazon is using similar tech.

Cat qubits have a distinctive feature compared to other options: bit flips are improbable, and get even less probable as you pump more photons into the resonator. But this has a drawback: more photons mean that phase flips become more probable.

Flipping cats

Those phase flips are why a second set of qubits, called transmons were brought in. (Transmons are a commonly used type of qubit based on a loop of superconducting wire linked to a microwave resonator and used by companies like IBM and Google.) These were used to create a chain of qubits, alternating between cat and transmon. This allowed the team to create a logical, error-corrected qubit using a simple error-correction code called a repetition code.

Image of a zig-zagging chain of alternating orange and blue circles.

The layout of Amazon’s hardware. Data-holding cat qubits (blue) alternate with transmons (orange), which can be measured to detect errors. Credit: Putterman et. al.

Here, each of the cat qubits starts off in the same state and is entangled with its neighboring transmons. This allowed the transmons to track what was going on in the cat qubits by performing what are called weak measurements. These don’t destroy the quantum state like a full measurement would but can allow the detection of changes in the neighboring cat qubits and provide the information needed to fix any errors.

So, the combination of the two means that almost all the errors that occur are phase flips, and the phase flips are detected and fixed.

In more typical error-correction schemes, you need enough qubits around to do measurements to identify both the location of an error and the nature of the error (phase or bit flip). Here, Amazon is assuming all errors are phase flips, and its team can identify the location of the flip based on which of the transmons detects an error, as shown by the red flags in the diagram above. It allows for a logical qubit that uses far fewer hardware qubits and measurements to get a given level of error correction.

The challenge of any error-correction setup is that each hardware qubit involved is error-prone. Adding too many into the error-correction system will mean that multiple errors are likely to occur simultaneously in a way that causes error correction to become impossible. Once the error rate of the hardware qubits gets low enough, however, adding additional qubits will bring the error rate down.

So, the key measurement done here is comparing a chain that has three cat qubits and two transmons to one that has five cat qubits and four transmons. These measurements showed that the five qubit chain had a lower error rate than the smaller one. This shows that the hardware is now at a state where error correction provides a benefit.

The characterization of the system indicated a couple of major limits, though. Cat qubits make bit flips extremely unlikely, but not impossible. By focusing error correction only on phase flips, any bit flips that do occur inescapably trigger the failure of the entire logical, error-corrected qubit. “Achieving long logical bit-flip times is challenging because any single cat qubit bit flip event in any part of the repetition code directly causes a logical bit flip error,” the authors note. The other issue is that the transmons used for error correction still suffer from both bit and phase flips, which can also mess up the entire error-corrected qubit.

Where does this leave us?

There are a number of companies like Amazon that are betting that using a somehow less error-prone hardware qubit will allow them to get effective error correction using fewer total hardware qubits. If they’re correct, they’ll be able to build error-corrected quantum computers using far fewer qubits, and so potentially perform useful computation sooner. For them, this paper is an important validation of the idea. You can do a sort of mixed-mode error correction, with a robust hardware qubit paired with a compact error-correction code.

But beyond that, the messages are pretty mixed. The hardware still had to rely on less robust hardware qubits (the transmons) to do error correction, and the very low error rate was still not low enough to avoid having occasional bit flips. And, ultimately, the error rate improvements gained by increasing the size of the logical qubit aren’t on a trajectory that would get you a useful level of error correction without needing an unrealistically large number of hardware qubits.

In short, the underlying hardware isn’t currently good enough to enable any sort of complex calculation, and it would need radical improvements before it can be. And there’s not an obvious alternate route to effective error correction. The potential of this approach is still there, but it’s not obvious how we’re going to build hardware that lives up to that potential.

As for Amazon, the picture is even less clear, given that this is the second qubit technology that it has talked about publicly. It’s unclear whether the company is going to go all-in on this approach, or is still looking for a technology that it’s willing to commit to.

Nature, 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-08642-7  (About DOIs).

Photo of John Timmer

John is Ars Technica’s science editor. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley. When physically separated from his keyboard, he tends to seek out a bicycle, or a scenic location for communing with his hiking boots.

Amazon uses quantum “cat states” with error correction Read More »

brewing-tea-removes-lead-from-water

Brewing tea removes lead from water

Testing the teas

Scanning electron microscope image of black tea leaves, magnified by 500 times. Black tea, which is wilted and fully oxidized, exhibits a wrinkled surface, potentially increasing the available surface area for adsorption. Credit: Vinayak P. Dravid Group/Northwestern University

To test their hypothesis, the authors purchased Lipton and Infusions commercial tea bags, as well as a variety of loose-leaf teas and herbal alternatives: black tea, green tea, white peony tea, oolong tea, rooibos tea, and chamomile tea. The tea bags were of different types (cotton, cellulose, and nylon). They brewed the tea the same way daily tea drinkers do, steeping the tea for various time intervals (mere seconds to 24 hours) in water spiked with elevated known levels of lead, chromium, copper zinc, and cadmium. Tea leaves were removed after steeping by pouring the tea through a cellulose filter into a separate tube. The team then measured how much of the toxic metals remained in the water and how much the leaves had adsorbed.

It turns out that the type of tea bag matters. The team found that cellulose tea bags work the best at adsorbing toxic metals from the water while cotton and nylon tea bags barely adsorbed any contaminants at all—and nylon bags also release contaminating microplastics to boot. Tea type and the grind level also played a part in adsorbing toxic metals, with finely ground black tea leaves performing the best on that score. This is because when those leaves are processed, they get wrinkled, which opens the pores, thereby adding more surface area. Grinding the tea further increases that surface area, with even more capacity for binding toxic metals.

But the most significant factor was steeping time: the longer the steeping time, the more toxic metals were adsorbed. Based on their experiments, the authors estimate that brewing tea—using a tea bag that steeps for three to five minutes in a mug—can remove about 15 percent of lead from drinking water, even water with concentrations as high as 10 parts per million.

Brewing tea removes lead from water Read More »

covid-shots-protect-kids-from-long-covid—and-don’t-cause-sudden-death

COVID shots protect kids from long COVID—and don’t cause sudden death

Benefits and a non-existent risk

Using an adjusted odds ratio, the researchers found that vaccination reduced the likelihood of developing long COVID with one or more symptoms by 57 percent, and reduced the likelihood of developing long COVID with two or more symptoms by 73 percent. Vaccination prior to infection was also linked to a 75 percent reduction in risk of developing long COVID that impacted day-to-day functioning. The authors note that the estimates of protection are likely underestimates because the calculations do not account for the fact that vaccination prevented some children from getting infected in the first place.

“Our findings suggest that children should stay up to date with current COVID-19 vaccination recommendations as vaccination not only protects against severe COVID-19 illness but also protects against [long Covid],” the authors conclude.

In a second short report in JAMA Network Open, researchers helped dispel concern that the vaccines could cause sudden cardiac arrest or sudden cardiac death in young athletes. This is an unproven claim that was fueled by anti-vaccine advocates amid the pandemic, including the new US Health Secretary and long-time anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

While previous analyses have failed to find a link between COVID-19 vaccines and sudden cardiac deaths, the new study took a broader approach. The study, led by researchers at the University of Washington, looked at whether the number of sudden cardiac arrests (SCA) and sudden cardiac deaths (SCD) among young athletes changed at all during the pandemic (2020–2022) compared with prior years (2017–2019). The researchers drew records from the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research. They also collected medical records and autopsy reports on cases among competitive athletes from the youth, middle school, high school, club, college, or professional levels who experienced sudden cardiac arrest or death at any time.

In all, there were 387 cases, with no statistically significant difference in the number of cases in the years prior to the pandemic (203) compared with those during the pandemic (184).

“This cohort study found no increase in SCA/SCD in young competitive athletes in the US during the COVID-19 pandemic, suggesting that reports asserting otherwise were overestimating the cardiovascular risk of COVID-19 infection, vaccination, and myocarditis,” the authors conclude.

COVID shots protect kids from long COVID—and don’t cause sudden death Read More »

in-war-against-dei-in-science,-researchers-see-collateral-damage

In war against DEI in science, researchers see collateral damage


Senate Republicans flagged thousands of grants as “woke DEI” research. What does that really mean?

Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz (R-Texas) at a hearing on Tuesday, January 28, 2025. Credit: Getty Images | Tom Williams

When he realized that Senate Republicans were characterizing his federally funded research project as one of many they considered ideological and of questionable scientific value, Darren Lipomi, chair of the chemical engineering department at the University of Rochester, was incensed. The work, he complained on social media, was aimed at helping “throat cancer patients recover from radiation therapy faster.” And yet, he noted on Bluesky, LinkedIn, and X, his project was among nearly 3,500 National Science Foundation grants recently described by the likes of Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican and chair of the powerful Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, as “woke DEI” research. These projects, Cruz argued, were driven by “Neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda,” and “far-left ideologies.”

“Needless to say,” Lipomi wrote of his research, “this project is not espousing class warfare.”

The list of grants was compiled by a group of Senate Republicans last fall and released to the public earlier this month, and while the NSF does not appear to have taken any action in response to the complaints, the list’s existence is adding to an atmosphere of confusion and worry among researchers in the early days of President Donald J. Trump’s second administration. Lipomi, for his part, described the situation as absurd. Others described it as chilling.

“Am I going to be somehow identified as an immigrant that’s exploiting federal funding streams and so I would just get deported? I have no idea,” said cell biologist Shumpei Maruyama, an early-career scientist and Japanese immigrant with permanent residency in the US, upon seeing his research on the government watch list. “That’s a fear.”

Just being on that list, he added, “is scary.”

The NSF, an independent government agency, accounts for around one-quarter of federal funding for science and engineering research at American colleges and universities. The 3,483 flagged projects total more than $2 billion and represent more than 10 percent of all NSF grants awarded between January 2021 and April 2024. The list encompasses research in all 50 states, including 257 grants totaling more than $150 million to institutions in Cruz’s home state of Texas.

The flagged grants, according to the committee report, “went to questionable projects that promoted diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) tenets or pushed onto science neo-Marxist perspectives about enduring class struggle.” The committee cast a wide net, using a programming tool to trawl more than 32,000 project descriptions for 699 keywords and phrases that they identified as linked to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Cruz has characterized the list as a response to a scientific grantmaking process that had become mired in political considerations, rather than focused on core research goals. “The Biden administration politicized everything it touched,” Cruz told Undark and NOTUS. “Science research is important, but we should want researchers spending time trying to figure out how to cure cancer, how to cure deadly diseases, not bean counting to satisfy the political agenda of Washington Democrats.”

“The ubiquity of these DEI requirements that the Biden administration engrafted on virtually everything,” Cruz added, “pulls a lot of good research money away from needed research to satisfy the political pet projects of Democrats.”

Others described the list—and other moves against DEI initiatives in research—as reversing decades-old bipartisan policies intended to strengthen US science. For past Congresses and administrations, including the first Trump term, DEI concepts were not controversial, said Neal F. Lane, who served as NSF director in the 1990s and as a science adviser to former President Bill Clinton. “Budget after budget was appropriated funds specifically to address these issues, to make sure all Americans have an opportunity to contribute to advancement of science and technology in the country,” he said. “And that the country then, in turn, benefits from their participation.”

At the same time, he added: “Politics can be ugly.”

Efforts to promote diversity in research predate the Biden administration. A half a century ago, the NSF established a goal of increasing the number of women and underrepresented groups in science. The agency began targeting programs for minority-serving institutions as well as minority faculty and students.

In the 1990s, Lane, as NSF director, ushered in the requirement that, in addition to intellectual merit, reviewers should consider a grant proposal’s “broader impacts.” In general, he said, the aim was to encourage science that would benefit society.

The broader impacts requirement remains today. Among other options, researchers can fulfill it by including a project component that increases the participation of women, underrepresented minorities in STEM, and people with disabilities. They can also meet the requirement by promoting science education or educator development, or by demonstrating that a project will build a more diverse workforce.

The Senate committee turned up thousands of “DEI” grants because the broad search not only snagged projects with a primary goal of increasing diversity—such as a $1.2 million grant to the Colorado School of Mines for a center to train engineering students to promote equity among their peers—but also research that referenced diversity in describing its broader impact or in describing study populations. Lipomi’s project, for example, was likely flagged because it mentions recruiting a diverse group of participants, analyzing results according to socioeconomic status, and posits that patients with disabilities might benefit from wearable devices for rehabilitation.

According to the committee report, concepts related to race, gender, societal status, as well as social and environmental justice undermine hard science. They singled out projects that identified groups of people as underrepresented, underserved, socioeconomically disadvantaged, or excluded; recognized inequities; or referenced climate research.

Red flags also included words like “gender,” “ethnicity,” and “sexuality,” along with scores of associated terms — “female,” “women,” “interracial,” “heterosexual,” “LGBTQ,” as well as “Black,” “White,” “Hispanic,” or “Indigenous” when referring to groups of people. “Status” also made the list along with words such as “biased,” “disability,” “minority,” and “socioeconomic.”

In addition, the committee flagged “environmental justice” and terms that they placed in that category such as “climate change,” “climate research,” and “clean energy.”

The committee individually reviewed grants for more than $1 million, according to the report.

The largest grant on the list awarded more than $29 million to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which contributes to the vast computing resources needed for artificial intelligence research. “I don’t know exactly why we were flagged, because we’re an AI resource for the nation,” said NCSA Director William Gropp.

One possible reason for the flag, Gropp theorized, is that one of the project’s aims is to provide computing power to states that have historically received less funding for research and development—including many Republican-leaning states—as well as minority-serving institutions. The proposal also states that a lack of diversity contributes to “embedded biases and other systemic inequalities found in AI systems today.”

The committee also flagged a grant with a total intended award amount of $26 million to a consortium of five institutions in North Carolina to establish an NSF Engineering Research Center to engineer microbial life in indoor spaces, promoting beneficial microbes while preventing the spread of pathogens. One example of such work would be thinking about how to minimize the risk that pathogens caught in a hospital sink would get aerosolized and spread to patients, said Joseph Graves, Jr., an evolutionary biologist and geneticist at North Carolina A&T State University and a leader of the project.

Graves was not surprised that his project made the committee’s list, as NSF policy has required research centers to include work on diversity and a culture of inclusion, he said.

The report, Graves said, seems intended to strip science of diversity, which he views as essential to the scientific endeavor. “We want to make the scientific community look more like the community of Americans,” said Graves. That’s not discriminating against White or Asian people, he said: “It’s a positive set of initiatives to give people who have been historically underrepresented and underserved in the scientific community and the products it produces to be at the table to participate in scientific research.”

“We argue that makes science better, not worse,” he added.

The political environment has seemingly left many scientists nervous to speak about their experiences. Three of the major science organizations Undark contacted—the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Institute of Physics—either did not respond or were not willing to comment. Many researchers appearing on Cruz’s list expressed hesitation to speak, and only men agreed to interviews: Undark contacted eight women leading NSF-funded projects on the list. Most did not respond to requests for comment, while others declined to talk on the record.

Darren Lipomi, the chemical engineer, drew a parallel between the committee report and US Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist campaign in the early 1950s. “It’s inescapable,” said Lipomi, whose project focused on developing a medical device that provides feedback on swallowing to patients undergoing radiation for head and neck cancer. “I know what Marxism is, and this was not that.”

According to Joanne Padrón Carney, chief government relations officer at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Republican interest in scrutinizing purportedly ideological research dovetails with a sweeping executive order, issued immediately after Trump’s inauguration, aimed at purging the government of anything related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Whether and how the Senate committee report will wind up affecting future funding, however, remains to be seen. “Between the executive order on DEI and now the list of terms that was used in the Cruz report, NSF is now in the process of reviewing their grants,” Carney said. One immediate impact is that scientists may become more cautious in preparing their proposals, said Carney.

Emails to the National Science Foundation went unanswered. In response to a question about grant proposals that, like Lipomi’s, only have a small component devoted to diversity, Cruz said their status should be determined by the executive branch.

“I would think it would be reasonable that if the DEI components can reasonably be severed from the project, and the remaining parts of the project are meritorious on their own, then the project should continue,” Cruz said. “It may be that nothing of value remains once DEI is removed. It would depend on the particular project.”

Physicist and former NSF head Neal F. Lane said he suspects that “DEI” has simply become a politically expedient target—as well as an excuse to slash spending. Threats to science funding are already causing huge uncertainty and distraction from what researchers and universities are supposed to be doing, he said. “But if there’s a follow-through on many of these efforts made by the administration, any damage would be enormous.”

That damage might well include discouraging young researchers from pursuing scientific careers at all, Carney said—particularly if the administration is perceived as being uninterested in a STEM workforce that is representative of the US population. “For us to be able to compete at the global arena in innovation,” she said, “we need to create as many pathways as we can for all young students—from urban and rural areas, of all races and genders—to see science and technology as a worthwhile career.”

These questions are not just academic for cell biologist and postdoctoral researcher Shumpei Maruyama, who is thinking about becoming a research professor. He’s now concerned that the Trump administration’s proposed cuts to funding from the National Institutes of Health, which supports research infrastructure at many institutions, will sour the academic job market as schools are forced to shutter whole sections or departments. He’s also worried that his research, which looks at the effects of climate change on coral reefs, won’t be fundable under the current administration—not least because his work, too, is on the committee’s list.

“Corals are important just for the inherent value of biodiversity,” Maruyama said.

Although he remains worried about what happens next, Maruyama said he is also “weirdly proud” to have his research flagged for its expressed connection to social and environmental justice. “That’s exactly what my research is focusing on,” he said, adding that the existence of coral has immeasurable environmental and social benefits. While coral reefs cover less than 1 percent of the world’s oceans in terms of surface area, they house nearly one-quarter of all marine species. They also protect coastal areas from surges and hurricanes, noted Maruyama, provide food and tourism for local communities, and are a potential source of new medications such as cancer drugs.

While he also studies corals because he finds them “breathtakingly beautiful,” Maruyama, suggested that everyone—regardless of ideology—has a stake in their survival. “I want them to be around,” he said.

This story was co-reported by Teresa Carr for Undark and Margaret Manto for NOTUS. This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

In war against DEI in science, researchers see collateral damage Read More »