75th Birthday for the Transistor - making modern life possible

 As far as we're concerned, the transistor is one of the greatest discoveries in human history...completely serious about this! It allowed for the creation of an electronic world, which literally everything is now dependent on. Learn a bit about it! 

Climate and Humanitarian issue - Landfills and Methane gas emissions

 We all know 8 billion humans are going to produce A LOT of waste everyday that goes to landfills in every country around the world. In a place like India, where human population density within cities is among the highest in the world, and combined with millions living in extreme poverty, some horrific situations can develop, such as landfills that are over 200 feet tall (as tall as the Taj Mahal). Hundreds of thousands of people live in the shadows of these literal mountains of trash. 

But an additional consequence is the decay of much of that garbage, and one of the gases released in decay is methane - a greenhouse gas many times worse than carbon dioxide. The amount of methane leaked from a single landfill this large is the same as the annual release from 350,000 cars in America. It is a humanitarian health emergency for those who are already extremely poor, but also a larger climate contributor. What is the answer to these situations??? The photo is from New Dehli, India, in April of 2022.

Perhaps you'll be inspired by this - bringing Mars samples back to Earth

 Check out a plan by NASA and others to bring back Mars soil and rock samples to Earth, using multiple spacecraft and vehicles. Would you ever want to be involved with something like this? It is very ambitious and innovative, to be sure. But also, what are the "unintended consequences" of doing this? Are there any we can and should think about? Very interesting, regardless, that humans have this sort of reach and capability to even consider doing this.

Movie of the early evolution of the universe, up to 100 million years after Big Bang

 An amazing animation coming from a supercomputer simulation of the evolution of the universe following the Big Bang has been published. This movie shows how it took tens of millions of years for the first gas atoms and molecules (almost entirely hydrogen) to begin to come together under gravity to form the first stars. What this new simulation does for the first time is include the interaction between radiation from the Big Bang and the first stars and matter (gas clouds). Filaments of gas formed in a web-like pattern, which are the white strands that develop in the movie. It is along these massive strands where more stars and eventually the first galaxies formed. We see web-like patterns of matter forming a superstructure to the universe to this day! Very cool! This is part of the Cosmic Dawn Project, which attempts to understand the birth and evolution of the universe.

The Proton - FAR from the basic, boring particle you've been taught

 Protons are incredibly complex quantum critters, it turns out! Most learn they are particles stuck in the nucleus. A few learn they are not fundamental particles, but instead made from quarks (2 ups, 1 down). And basically no one learns they are complex, changing bags of gluons and quarks, in a quantum world where just about anything goes! The theory of what happens in the nucleus and nucleons is quantum chromodynamics (QCD), which is a difficult mathematical theory, to say the least. 

Check out this article from Quanta Magazine (which I also highly recommend)!

UN Adaptation Report

 This U.N. report looks at adaptive strategies around the world for climate change that is already here and what's coming. Adaptation to climate change is one of two necessary pathways running in parallel - the second is direct mitigation efforts to reduce the effect of climate change. Projections for costs of each are staggering, and it's not clear whether much of either will be able to get done without the committed financial backing of developed nations.

Evanstonian article about EMPATHY Project

 A big thank you to Ethan and the Evanstonian staff for the nice article about our EMPATHY Project. This is the effort to raise money for friends in Malawi, in order to ensure children have enough food for an entire school year so they can remain in school. With this becoming a national model, we hope that some 10,000 children will benefit from this program! 

If willing and able, donations can always be made here. 

Two AI sites you may want to try

 A couple AI sites, courtesy of Luca:

Drawing one: https://www.craiyon.com/

You need an account for this one, but it will write whatever you prompt it to: https://beta.openai.com/playground.

Some Money for Malawi!

 THANK YOUs go out to everyone who helped either in school or online, where we raised a quick $1020 to send to our friends in Malawi! This is equivalent to 1.042 million kwacha, and will be used by some new schools to prepare land for planting crops as they go into their spring and planting season. Our model will help over 10,000 children once the couple dozen schools harvest their crops towards the end of their summer in 2023. Each harvest will feed the kids at the school for an entire year, and this model has largely been adopted as a national model to avoid famine and kids missing school due to hunger.

See our EMPATHY Project site for details. We also have a GoFundMe site to raise money any time. 

For those who like the MATH in Physics: REAL Quantum Mechanics, the Hydrogen Atom

 Back in 2013, a student who was in multivariable calculus wanted to apply the math to something in physics. She was a real go-getter, so I suggested she try to do REAL Quantum Mechanics and use her MV to figure out the hard-core derivation of a hydrogen atom's energy states and wave function. Katie took that challenge and ran with it! 

Check out her paper!! She hand-wrote a ~30 page paper as a 'how to do QM' guide for other students. She derived everything, learned the solutions to different partial differential equations (using things like Legendre polynomials, spherical harmonics, Laguerre polynomials, etc.). It is beautiful, impressive work! Katie is presently working on her PhD in physics, and continues to be amazing. 

This paper shows the power of higher level mathematics in physics, as well as the level of difficulty of QM and how impressive the scientists who discovered all this were.