Government-funded grants favor research exploring 'white supremacy' and 'non-normative forms of gender and sexuality' according to new analysis.

If you thought the august National Science Foundation focused only on string theory or the origins of life, you haven't spent much time in a university lab lately. Thanks to a major shift endorsed by the Biden administration, recent grants have gone to researchers seeking to identify "hegemonic narratives" and their effect on "non-normative forms of gender and sexuality," plus "systematic racism" in the education of math teachers and "sex/gender narratives in undergraduate biology and their impacts on transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming students."

A new report from Republican members of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation made available to The Free Press says that DEI considerations now profoundly shape NSF grant decisions.

When three massive objects meet in space, they influence each other through gravity in ways that evolve unpredictably. In a word: Chaos. That is the conventional understanding. Now, a researcher from the University of Copenhagen has discovered that such encounters often avoid chaos and instead follow regular patterns, where one of the objects is quickly expelled from the system. This new insight may prove vital for our understanding of gravitational waves and many other aspects of the universe.

One of the most popular shows on Netflix at the moment is the science fiction series 3-Body Problem. Based on a Chinese novel series by Liu Cixin, the series involves a menagerie of characters, time periods and even extraterrestrial visitors. But the central premise is concerned with a star system in which three stars gravitate around one another.

Such a system, with three objects influencing each other's gravity, has fascinated scientists ever since the "father of gravity," Isaac Newton, first described it. While the interaction between two objects meeting in space is predictable, the introduction of a third massive object makes the triadic encounter not just complex, but chaotic.

There is a profound mystery in our sun. While the sun's surface temperature measures around 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit, its outer atmosphere, known as the solar corona, measures more like 2 million degrees Fahrenheit, about 200 times hotter.

This increase in temperature away from the sun is perplexing and has been an unsolved mystery since 1939, when the high temperature of the corona was first identified. In the ensuing decades, scientists have tried to determine the mechanism that could cause this unexpected heating, but so far, they have not succeeded.

Now, a team led by Sayak Bose, a researcher at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), has made a significant advancement in understanding the underlying heating mechanism. Their recent findings show that reflected plasma waves could drive the heating of coronal holes, which are low-density regions of the solar corona with open magnetic field lines extending into interplanetary space. These findings represent major progress toward solving one of the most mysterious quandaries about our closest star.

Researchers discovered that some comb jellies can fuse their bodies together when injured. The unique adaptation, which involves merging their nervous systems and stomachs, has never been seen in any other species.

Bizarre deep-sea creatures known as comb jellies can fuse together when they are injured, creating a single massive individual with permanently combined nervous systems and stomachs, a new study reveals. This unusual adaptation has never been seen before in any other species, researchers say.

The researchers discovered the fused jellies by accident in the lab.

"I was very excited [when I found them]," study lead author Kei Jokura, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Exeter in the U.K. and Japan's National Institutes of Natural Sciences in Okazaki, told Live Science in an email. "I immediately took the fused comb jellies from the room where I was keeping them and showed them to the other lab members."

Physicists showed that photons can seem to exit a material before entering it, revealing observational evidence of negative time.
Quantum physicists are familiar with wonky, seemingly nonsensical phenomena: atoms and molecules sometimes act as particles, sometimes as waves; particles can be connected to one another by a "spooky action at a distance," even over great distances; and quantum objects can detach themselves from their properties like the Cheshire Cat from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland detaches itself from its grin. Now researchers led by Daniela Angulo of the University of Toronto have revealed another oddball quantum outcome: photons, wave-particles of light, can spend a negative amount of time zipping through a cloud of chilled atoms. In other words, photons can seem to exit a material before entering it.

"It took a positive amount of time, but our experiment observing that photons can make atoms seem to spend a *negative* amount of time in the excited state is up!" wrote Aephraim Steinberg, a physicist at the University of Toronto, in a post on X (formerly Twitter) about the new study, which was uploaded to the preprint server arXiv.org on September 5 and has not yet been peer-reviewed.

The idea for this work emerged in 2017. At the time, Steinberg and a lab colleague, then doctoral student Josiah Sinclair, were interested in the interaction of light and matter, specifically a phenomenon called atomic excitation: when photons pass through a medium and get absorbed, electrons swirling around atoms in that medium jump to higher energy levels. When these excited electrons lapse to their original state, they release that absorbed energy as reemitted photons, introducing a time delay in the light's observed transit time through the medium.

Sinclair's team wanted to measure that time delay (which is sometimes technically called a "group delay") and learn whether it depends on the fate of that photon: Was it scattered and absorbed inside the atomic cloud, or was it transmitted with no interaction whatsoever? "At the time, we weren't sure what the answer was, and we felt like such a basic question about something so fundamental should be easy to answer," Sinclair says. "But the more people we talked to, the more we realized that while everyone had their own intuition or guess, there was no expert consensus on what the right answer would be." Because the nature of these delays can be so strange and counterintuitive, some researchers had written the phenomenon off as effectively meaningless for describing any physical property associated with light.

The James Webb Space Telescope has zoomed in on an ancient supernova, revealing fresh evidence that a crisis in cosmology called the Hubble tension isn't going anywhere soon.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has discovered yet another troubling sign that there's something very wrong with our model of the universe.

Depending on which part of the universe astronomers measure, the cosmos seems to be growing at different rates — a problem scientists call the Hubble tension. Measurements taken from the distant, early universe show that the expansion rate, called the Hubble constant, closely matches our best current model of the universe, while those taken nearer to Earth threaten to break it.

Now, a new study using the gravitationally-warped light of a 10.2 billion light-year distant supernova has revealed that the mystery could be here to stay. The researchers released their findings in a series of papers in The Astrophysical Journal. The Hubble tension calculations have also been accepted for publication in the journal, and are posted in a paper on the pre-print database arXiv.

"Our team's results are impactful: The Hubble constant value matches other measurements in the local universe, and is somewhat in tension with values obtained when the universe was young," co-author Brenda Frye, an associate professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona said in a statement.

New images of an asteroid impact crater buried deep below the floor of the Atlantic Ocean have been published today by researchers at Heriot-Watt University.

The images confirm the 9km Nadir Crater, located 300m under the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, was caused by an asteroid smashing into Earth at the end of the Cretaceous period around 66 million years ago.

That's the same age as the dinosaur-killing 200 km wide, Chicxulub impact crater in Mexico.

There are around 20 confirmed marine craters worldwide, and none of them has been captured in anything close to this level of detail.

Dr Uisdean Nicholson

The images have helped the researchers determine what happened in the minutes following impact: the formation of an initial bowl-shaped crater, rocks turned to a fluid-like state and flowing upwards to the crater floor, the creation of a damage zone covering thousands of square kilometres beyond the crater, and an 800-metre-plus high tsunami that would have travelled across the Atlantic ocean.

The findings are reported in Nature Communications Earth & Environment.

New analysis of Betelgeuse's brightness variations and other data points to a small, close companion for this giant star.

Astronomers may have discovered a companion star orbiting around Betelgeuse, one of the brightest and most famous stars in the sky. The gravity of this partner could help explain the way Betelgeuse regularly brightens and dims. What's more, Betelgeuse could consume this companion in as little as 10,000 years.

Betelgeuse is one of the best studied stars, with detailed records stretching back more than a century. Thanks to these observations, astronomers know that Betelgeuse is highly variable. The star pulsates violently, which alters its brightness in a pattern that repeats roughly every 400 days. However, there is a second pattern of brightness variation lasting approximately 2,000 days. This second pattern also appears in measurements of the star's motions toward and away from Earth (its radial velocity), which suggest that Betelgeuse is slowly rocking back and forth. As early as 1908, astronomers were speculating that this was due to an unseen companion star pulling the gravitational strings. Except no-one has ever found evidence of one — until now, perhaps.

A team led by Morgan MacLeod (Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian) has collated and analysed more than a century's worth of data, including measurements of Betelgeuse's radial velocity, brightness (photometry), and position on the sky (astrometry). The researchers conclude that each of these data sets could be explained if Betelgeuse has what they whimsically refer to as "a little friend." Their paper is available on the arXiv preprint server.

To explain the data, the companion would need to be less massive than the Sun and would take 2,110 days to orbit Betelgeuse from a distance equivalent to the giant star's width. (Betelgeuse is about as wide as Jupiter is far from the Sun.) "It was very surprising," says MacLeod. "It's kind of hidden right there in plain sight."

"The dataset that the authors put forward is rather compelling," says Rene Oudmaijer (Royal Observatory of Belgium), who was not involved in the research. "The caveat is of course that the companion itself is not directly detected, so there is still room for doubt."

Astronomers are monitoring a new comet discovered just a few days ago by the ATLAS survey. It's so new, it doesn't have a name yet. Provisionally designated "A11bP7I," the comet appears to be a relatively large sungrazer on course to become a bright naked-eye object in late October. Dennis Möller, Michael Jäger and Gerald Rhemann photographed the new discovery last night in Namibia:
"We are here in Namibia to observe Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS," says Jäger. "The new sungrazing comet was discovered not far away, so we took a look. It is already 11th mag with a 2' green coma and a short tail."

The orbit and brightness of A11bP7I remind experts of Comet Lovejoy (C/2011 W3), a sungrazer that flew through the sun's atmosphere in Dec. 2011. Comet Lovejoy emerged from the close encounter intact and put on a spectacular show for amateur astronomers during the Christmas holidays of that year.

ASI Alliance founder Ben Goertzel says the alpha version of OpenCog Hyperon — the artificial general intelligence system he's been developing for more than two decades — is already "self-aware" to a certain extent.

Goertzel also tells Magazine he believes OpenAI likely shied away from making its "very impressive" new o1 model an autonomous agent for fear that it would be seen as "risky and dangerous" and provoke a crackdown from regulators.

The Artificial Superintelligence Alliance was formed in March this year, bringing together Goertzel's SingularityNET project, Ocean Protocol and DeepMind veteran Humayun Sheikh's FetchAI.

This week, 96% of CUDOS voters approved the decentralized cloud hardware network's merger with ASI. The merger will boost the compute available for Goertzel's plans to scale up OpenCog Hyperon, the AGI system he's been working on since 2001 and launched as an open-source AI framework in 2008.