If you or anyone you ever know are having mental health crises, and/or even initial thoughts of suicide, please make use of the national hotline where you can immediately talk to someone who can help, or find help for you.
TEXT OR DIAL 988! Or you can go to 988lifeline.org.
What is now the world's largest tokamak (sort of like a toroid shaped reactor) thermonuclear fusion reactor is now working north of Tokyo, Japan. The continued work towards the 'Holy Grail' of energy production is making progress towards the dream of unlimited energy (can get the 'fuel' from water, which is deuterium and tritium, the isotopes of hydrogen), with no risk of meltdowns, no radioactive waste, and no greenhouse gas emissions. This is a big attempt to show fusion is possible, and can scale up to industrial and commercial production levels. Let's hope this works and shows scientists and engineers the next steps of accomplishing this long-term dream!
Here is how politics instantly affects science (STEM in general) research. At the professional level, most university funding comes through grants. One must write a proposal to foundations, businesses, individuals, or a huge amount from the federal government. The largest amount of federal funding comes through the National Science Foundation, or NSF. But with new directives from the current administration, and its obsession to get rid of anything that they think smells like 'DEI' (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), one can lose their federal funding, and who knows if other legal consequences will be part of this.
Check out this article to see a LIST OF WORDS that will get a scientific paper FLAGGED FOR DEI. Apparently, federal agencies like NSF, the CDC, and likely every other one, are scrubbing published papers on their websites to remove these words. This is outright censorship, and we all need to be aware of this in K-12 research because so many programs and opportunities to help all sorts of students may have federal funding behind them. This could include anything a school does with colleges, special education, food programs, different grants or fellowships through the Dept. of Education (which is being significantly downsized, with a stated goal of the president to be eliminated), and anything a school is doing that has to do with helping students of color, girls (yes, FEMALE and WOMEN are on the banned list), LGBTQ kids, or any group that is underrepresented in anything...ALL of this can get your work or funding flagged for DEI.
This is a new era for science research, and we all need to be aware of it. This is dangerous, and is what authoritarians and dictators do to control countries and its citizens - the notion of any ideas that differ from 'the state' are banned and outlawed, and has been done throughout history by all sorts of regimes. Be safe, be strong, and resist this nonsense!
This looks like a pretty interesting binary star system simulator, with the added twist that it shows the eclipsing consequences of the radiation flux we observe from earth.
If we see a system more from a side view of the plane the star's orbits are on, at certain times one of the stars blocks or partially blocks the other, resulting in dips in the light intensity we detect. This is a great way to measure the orbital periods, which are also needed to determine the masses of the stars. Pretty cool!
https://www.facebook.com/reel/961516545536542
Check this out! Ingredients for life found in samples brought back from an asteroid!!
The Earth's magnetic field is quite complex. The first thing to note is all magnetism we know of comes from moving electric charges and electric currents. For something like a planet, the question then becomes where are the currents?
The Earth has a solid inner core, but then a molten iron outer core - that is the key. As my students are well aware, metals are special because they have free electrons moving throughout (the 'electron sea'). Normally these free electrons are moving randomly through the metal. But then, we need to remember that the earth rotates. The rotation causes the molten iron to flow in one direction, and suddenly we have a circular current of electrons, and this contributes to the magnetic field.
Fluid dynamics is complex and very challenging mathematically. Turbulence happens, and because Earth is spherical, that geometry introduces different rotational velocities in different regions of the molten iron. The complexities of flow and the electric currents that result causes the Earth's magnetic field to be dynamic - it is constantly changing, and on occasion when turbulent regions develop, and sometimes the flow locally can be opposite the main flow, irregularities exist within the global magnetic field. This is likely what is happening in the outer core to cause the South Atlantic Magnetic Anomaly. It has grown over the past few decades, and is a region where the magnetic field has already 'flipped' polarity. At some point, perhaps in the coming centuries, the global field may undergo another reversal, where our compass needles will point opposite where it points today. We'll see how this plays out!
This program, run by the Varkey Foundation in the United Kingdom, has become known as the 'Nobel Prize for Teaching.' Any teacher on the planet can apply or be nominated, and ultimately one teacher wins a $1 million award! Each year, thousands of teachers apply, and the Top 50 teachers in the world for that year are determined and named Top 50 Finalists. Someone from that group will win the prize, but all 50 will be part of the Global Teacher Prize Ambassador Program.
The Top 50 Finalists cohorts can be found here for each year it has been run. Note that from the Top 50, a group of Top 10 Finalists is selected, and one of them will be the winner. Go here to find 2025's Top 10 Finalists. Yours truly is in the first group of finalists from 2015. The photo below is the group of American teachers from our summit and conference in Dubai, from 2018; it was about one month after the Parkland shootings that we had this meeting, to talk about school safety.
Well, the goal of the Paris Climate Accords (signed in 2016) was to prevent global temperatures from going above 1.5-degrees Celcius, but in 2024 the world has exceeded that level for the first time. If you are into climate science and the data behind all this, check out the 2024 Climate Summary published by Copernicus Climate Change Service.
The last 10 years have been the 10 hottest years on record, which goes back some 150 years or so. Another telling set of measurements has been surface temperatures of our oceans, which have been rising annually, as well (note the attached graph, and how the last two years really stand out). Ocean temps are important because the hotter the water gets, the more evaporation occurs, and this fuels storms such as hurricanes/cyclones around the world. This is why storms are more powerful, on average, than in the past.
I personally worry about losing another 4 years of any progress regarding climate change, as the new administration's energy policy goes back to an old, archaic and dangerous chant of "Drill, drill, drill." Without US leadership, it is more unlikely the rest of the world will be able to do much. But let's keep reminding the world climate change is real, it is already causing major problems in every region of the world and costing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage and human life (as I write this, the Los Angeles area is burning, with loss of life and tens of billions of dollars in losses, for example)
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.
