A claim has now been made that the world's first commercial fusion reactor (that can plug into the power grid) will be online in "the early 2030s", in Richmond, Virginia.
THIS WILL BE A BIG DEAL if successful! But for decades, scientists have made claims fusion would be available in ten years, and it is not clear if these power companies and startups will be ready in a few years, but let's certainly hope they or someone else will be successful soon. Should be interesting!
Going into the 2nd semester, the seniors will be changing focus from electricity to magnetism. This is a new discovery about the very nature of magnetism, and is still trying to be fully understood and explored. It is a quasiparticle found roaming in magnetic materials of all kinds, and at all temperatures.
In the coming years, we will almost certainly hear a LOT more about this, and how new applications and understandings of magnetism develop, in industries such as computer engineering and how memory and other aspects of computers work.
Check out this paper by two high school students, who found trig-based proofs of the Pythagorean theorem, once thought to not be possible! Very cool!!
See the Science News article about this here.
This is a summary paper about the Nobel winners in economics (2 from MIT, 1 from U. of Chicago), who contribute to our understanding of how and why some countries such as the USA have accumulated massive wealth, while many other countries have not and whose citizens are sometimes desperately poor.
Generally, it largely depends on the types of institutions developed in a country - the more inclusive the institutions, such as in countries leaning towards or practicing democracy, the more wealth is generated and the higher the GDP per capita. If institutions are extractive, such as in oligarchies and authoritarian countries, the less wealth per citizen, and whatever wealth there is tends to be concentrated with the few in power.
Equipotential lines and surfaces are a big thing in electrostatics. Graphically, these provide a way of trying to visualize an abstract quantity such as voltage, and mathematically it makes use of a gradient - E-field = dV/dr
The graphing program and site DESMOS has a wonderful visualization and simulator for this. We just wanted to be sure everyone has access to this, and hopefully it will help make sense out of this abstract, mathematical concept.
What great timing, where an article in Science News about a projectile method of spreading pollen for a certain type of plant, came out while we are studying projectile motion.
The Brazilian flower Hypenea macrantha has evolved a catapult-like mechanism that can launch its pollen when hummingbirds have their beaks in the flower, sipping out nectar. This does two things: it helps knock other, competitor flower's pollen off the beaks of hummingbirds, and then increases the amount of the flower's own pollen that sticks to the beak, thus increasing the odds of having its pollen transferred to a female flower. Nature is awesome!
It appears that the College Board has changed the way some of the AP subject exams are scored. For example, the percentage of students getting scores of 4 or 5 on the US History, US Government, and European History nearly doubled from 2023 to 2024. Others, like Chemistry and Biology, have seen dramatic recalibrations a couple years ago.
Grade inflation is something that has dramatically risen since the Covid shutdowns, mostly done to help alleviate the severe and oftentimes traumatic stresses that were present for everyone, both students and adults. But as we have come out of the shutdowns, perhaps a key question should be "is getting a B or C the end of the world?" It doesn't make any sense if everyone gets an A in classes if they clearly have not mastered much of the material...'average' is a concept that has seemingly been dismissed. On an AP exam, a score of 4 or 5 is supposed to represent high levels of mastery of the subject. Perhaps we all have done ourselves a disservice by boosting up the acceptance of mediocrity and confusing it with mastery and excellence. Where this tends NOT to happen, though, is when trying to get jobs ultimately.
So let's work on the excellence part of all this throughout the school year, and have some fun learning all about how our world and universe work fundamentally, and become excellent problem solvers who will have the ability to truly fix some of the problems in the world and discover new bits of knowledge that can be useful in our understanding of life and nature! The scores on tests will come along for the ride, and if we are successful building up our knowledge and skills, they will be representative of our excellence. BUT, it is also true that it is likely NOT EVERYONE WILL GET THERE! AND THAT'S OK! We all learn at different rates and have different strengths and weaknesses, so sometimes it takes many of us longer than others to master topics and courses. If some of us need to take some classes over when in college, THAT IS OK, TOO! You will be well-prepared for that scenario because of the background from the high school course, and AP classes are called 'Advanced' for a reason - they are challenging!
Let's have fun learning, together, and see where it leads!
Scientists have found a feature of photos that can be added to a list of things to determine if a photo is authentic or a deepfake. Deepfakes are electronically created photos or videos, using AI, that are nearly impossible for untrained eyes to determine if the photo/video is of something real or made-up. There are countless examples online, and perhaps the most deepfaked person is former President Obama.
Using techniques and information learned primarily from astronomers, and how they take and analyze photos of distant galaxies, it turns our that for photos of humans the key is to check out the eyes. In real photos, generally the reflections of light in the eyes should be the same. AI has not learned this correctly - YET - so presently one can check the colors and reflections of eyes, and that can help determine if it is a fake or not.
This is especially important right now, heading into fall elections, when different individuals and groups are trying to smear candidates and get disinformation to go viral online. Deepfakes have become so easy to create that the average person looking at ads and content would likely not be able to tell the difference, making it SO challenging to determine what's real or not.
A FYI I received:
Create an independent research paper. Work with top researchers
The Lumiere Research Scholar Program helps high school students work one-on-one with a scholar on an independent research project. At the end of the program, you'll develop an independent research paper that you could use for college admissions or future studies. Our mentors are PhD scholars from top research universities such as Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Yale, Duke and LSE. The program was founded by a Harvard & Oxford PhD who met as undergraduates at Harvard.
The program is rigorous and fully virtual. We offer need based financial aid for students who qualify. You can find the application in the brochure! To learn more, you can reach out to our Head of Growth and Partnerships, Maya Novak-Herzog, at maya.novak-herzog@lumiere.
The early bird deadline for application to the Fall cohort is July 30th, 2024.
Link to the application: Lumiere Research Scholar Application.
Using the way an octopus thinks about and navigates spatially, and also in time, researchers have created the next level of AI 'thinking' and processing information in its environment. This is episodic memory, and allows an AI to have better remembrances of past events it was involved in, learn from it, and have better thought out solutions to future problems based on those past events. It allows AI to be more animal-like rather than machine-like. Researchers have taken the leap from a sea slug brain, which is very simple, and made it more like an octopus brain...the evolution of this will ultimately, they think, to how a human brain operates, remembers, thinks things through, react to internal 'feelings', predict, and have creative, original thoughts.
What are your thoughts about where AI is and where it will go? What should the ethics of creating and using AI's be? Who should make those decisions about AI? What are the consequences of more and more advanced AI in our human world, such as how will it change and replace humans jobs and careers? These are all vital questions we all should be thinking about, because AI is affecting most jobs and aspects of life already!
This summarizes the study results of the effectiveness of Rebel Human school resources on the mental health of my students, who were juniors and seniors in 3 and 4 Chem/Phys AP Physics classes. The RH resources have been used exclusively at ETHS in Physical Education classes for the last 3 years, for nearly all students in the building, grades 9-12. This is part of an effort to begin exposing and teaching students some critical social-emotional learning (SEL) skills, and SEL is one of the 4 primary goals of ETHS. If it helps, rearrange the letters and let's call this ELS, ESSENTIAL LIFE SKILLS - this is what we're really talking about when you hear or read SEL!!
We wanted to go outside of PE classes, and do a formal study on RH impact on the mental health of my students. We had enough sections of juniors and seniors to have two control sections and three intervention sections. Despite limited sample sizes and limited time (December 2023 - April 2024) of exposure to the deep breathing methods to help manage stress and one's emotions in a healthy way, we were honestly surprised to find statistically significant results for some of the measures of anxiety and depressive symptoms, as well as the use of eustress (the positive use of stress for things like motivation, emotional control, reduction of stress, etc.). Check out a summary of the entire study, including dozens of anonymous positive comments from students in the intervention sections. The more students used and talked about the RH methods and SEL skills, the more they saw the relevance and importance of making use of them in classes, in relationships, in athletics, and generally in life, to help manage stress and their mental health.
Keep in mind that healthy students learn more, show better behavior, get along with each other better, and find more growth, happiness, and success in life. This is the essence of being strong in SEL skills, and is why this is a primary goal of ETHS!
The first major hurricane of the season, Hurricane Beryl, is hitting the Caribbean, and is now a category 5 (the strongest category) monster. This is a good article with an expert who says conditions for this year's season are unprecedented. In fact, this is the strongest storm on record this early in the season, due to the record high temperatures of the oceans and Gulf of Mexico. Remember, warm, moist air is the fuel for any storm, including hurricanes/cyclones, which is why the strengths of storms and amount of rain they release has been steadily rising the last couple decades.
Here are some other search engines, some of which might be useful for STEM:
A new technique has been devised that allows physicists to use quantum entanglement to measure the rotational rate of the earth. This is yet another example of the expanding set of experiments that are using quantum mechanical phenomena to measure all sorts of other phenomena, in addition to new quantum mechanical properties. There is a hope that experiments like this will lead to new insights of how quantum mechanics and gravity are related - the Holy Grail of physics is to construct a theory encompassing general relativity (gravity) with quantum mechanics and the Standard Model.
Some good news and progress in the implementation of using renewable energy sources (primarily this refers to wind and solar energy) and battery storage on large scales: California, by itself the 6th largest economy on the planet, has been generating and storing more energy than the state uses for 30 of the last 38 days. While it is for periods of time on order of a couple hours, this is huge progress in the US.
California has been leading the nation in energy and climate policy for decades, and this is part of that trend and commitment. Projections have the state running itself with renewables and battery storage in full by 2035. That is the goal, and is so encouraging for progress to cut back on using fossil fuels and cutting down on greenhouse gases! It is also a model for every other state to try and continue to make progress in this vital issue.
OK, so humans have been watching the sky for millenia, and we have discovered a lot of objects orbiting the Sun, we've learned a lot about our own galaxy, the Milky Way; and we have learned a lot about how we are not the only galaxy in the universe, but one of more than a trillion of galaxies flying away from each other in all directions through the vastness of space and time! Because there are a mind-numbing number of objects out there in space-time, we still do not have a solid handle on our own neighborhood, our solar system. For many years, some scientists have wondered and even expected to find "Planet 9" or "Planet X", another planet well beyond the orbits of Neptune and the former planet Pluto. There are reasons for this suspicion, of course, but no direct evidence for it.
But now, there is a new paper that provides the BEST statistical analysis and reasoning yet that requires the existence of Planet 9, which is needed to explain small perturbations in the orbits of the outer planets. This is why science is so cool! There will always be new information, measurements, observations, and theories coming in and out of existence as scientists try to piece together countless objects moving around the universe, all of which influence each other through gravity. It is ridiculously complicated and hard, but that's where the fun is for us, trying to figure it out! The diagram is via Wikipedia.
The combination of El Nino and climate change continues to hit some of the poorest countries in the world, with widespread drought and increased levels of hunger in southern Africa. This includes our friends in Malawi. For the fourth consecutive year, the Malawian President has had to call for a state of disaster due to climate issues; this includes Malawi and some of the schools we help being hit by Cyclone Freddy last year. The drought is the worst that has been experienced in the last 50 to 100 years, depending where one is.
This further encourages us to continue to help support our Malawi friends into the future. They need additional funding to maintain crops, drill wells, and create irrigation systems to continue to survive through the extreme weather they experience in Sub-Saharan Africa.
As ice sheets melt, more liquid water is settling near the equator. As mass redistributes like this, guess what changes for the earth? All juniors and seniors should have it click in your brains that the moment of inertia of the rotating earth changes ever so slightly, which in turn will affect the angular velocity of the earth due to conservation of angular momentum. As this happens, another consequence will be slight changes in how humans keep and measure time! Interesting applications of the rotational motion we study.
A really interesting idea is being investigated by astronomers at LIGO, the famous experiment that detected gravitational waves, predicted by Einstein around 1915 and discovered by LIGO in 2015. Some early low-energy gravitational waves should have been produced in the fractions of a second after the Big Bang occurred. This is similar to the microwave background found everywhere in the universe. New techniques are being considered for trying to detect these incredibly low energy waves, which would have been generated during a phase where the strong nuclear force emerged from the Big Bang. More fascinating ideas to consider!
This is an article from phys.org, and gets into how some scientists are thinking the first cells to form on earth came into existence. Always fascinating to think about this!
As the seniors were discussing, the earth's magnetic field is constantly changing, and every 200,000 or so years, on average, it reverses! Compasses will point south someday, as they have many times in earth's history.
From computer simulations, one thing that happens before a reversal is the earth's overall magnetic field weakens, and then anomalies in the field begin to form - small regions of the field where it begins to reverse itself, due to complex fluid dynamics going on in the earth's liquid iron outer-core. Scientists are identifying such anomalies, suggesting that the weakening field (the has in fact decreased at a quick pace over the last few centuries) may be getting set for a full reversal! This is something to follow in the coming years, to see how the field evolves.
A new report from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) concludes that AI will affect nearly 40% of jobs around the world. In developed countries, it is expected to impact as high as 60% of jobs! These are staggering numbers that will have a profound impact on people's lives in every country around the world, eliminating many while increasing productivity, which is the driver for nearly any company. Some tech leaders say the effect AI will have on humanity is on par with the effect fire had - that is, how shall we say...BIG!
For students, this means there is a new pressure to become acquainted with and learn how to use AI in creative ways. It means finding jobs where showing actual, real humanity will be irreplaceable. No one can predict how this will turn out. The implementation of AI into the global economy will evolve quickly, and without feelings. It will be a multi-trillion dollar industry, so many are looking at how they can profit from the development of AI. This is already a big part of your world, and is about to become one of teh most dominant pieces of your world, whether you like it or not.
