Science

A novel study from the Center for Britain and Europe (CBE) highlights a significant shift in the political landscape of Europe, revealing that populist radical right (PRR) politics is moving from the fringes to the heart of mainstream political discourse.

This collaborative research, co-authored by Professor Daniele Albertazzi and visiting postgraduate researcher Mirko Crulli, has been published in the open-access West European Politics journal.

Professor Albertazzi, Co-Director of CBE, asserts that the findings challenge the prevailing belief that PRR parties can be overlooked as peripheral entities in European politics. “The radical right is no longer the outsider; it’s shaping the core of political debate and is already increasingly taking part in government coalitions across the continent,” he stated.

The study emphasizes that while nativist and authoritarian values may not have become mainstream yet, the rise of populism has undeniably altered our understanding of what mainstream politics entails. “Populism has become a defining feature of contemporary politics, influencing party strategies and ideologies across Europe,” Professor Albertazzi explained.

This research not only underscores the evolving nature of political norms in Europe but also showcases the CBE’s commitment to fostering opportunities for junior scholars. Mirko Crulli’s contribution and collaboration as a visiting postgraduate researcher in 2022 exemplifies the CBE’s role in supporting emerging voices in political research.

As PRR ideologies continue to integrate into mainstream parties, the implications for democracy in Europe are profound. The study calls for a reassessment of how political entities engage with the public and each other in this rapidly changing environment.

In May 2024, a geomagnetic storm hit Earth, sending auroras across the planet’s skies in a once-in-a-generation light display. These dazzling sights are possible because of the interaction of coronal mass ejections—explosions of plasma and magnetic field from the sun—with Earth’s magnetic field, which protects us from the radiation the sun spits out during turbulent storms.

But what might happen to humans beyond the safety of Earth’s protection? This question is essential as NASA plans to send humans to the moon and on to Mars. During the May storm, the small spacecraft BioSentinel was collecting data to learn more about the impacts of radiation in deep space.

“We wanted to take advantage of the unique stage of the solar cycle we’re in—the solar maximum, when the sun is at its most active—so that we can continue to monitor the space radiation environment,” said Sergio Santa Maria, principal investigator for BioSentinel’s spaceflight mission at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley.

“These data are relevant not just to the heliophysics community but also to understand the radiation environment for future crewed missions into deep space.”

BioSentinel—a small satellite about the size of a cereal box—is currently more than 30 million miles from Earth, orbiting the sun, where it weathered May’s coronal mass ejection without protection from a planetary magnetic field.

Preliminary analysis of the data collected indicates that even though this was an extreme geomagnetic storm, that is, a storm that disturbs Earth’s magnetic field, it was considered just a moderate solar radiation storm, meaning it did not produce a great increase in hazardous solar particles. Therefore, such a storm did not pose any major issue to terrestrial lifeforms, even if they were unprotected as BioSentinel was.

These measurements provide useful information for scientists trying to understand how solar radiation storms move through space and where their effects—and potential impacts on life beyond Earth—are most intense.

The original mission of BioSentinel was to study samples of yeast in deep space. Though these yeast samples are no longer alive, BioSentinel has adapted and continues to be a novel platform for studying the potential impacts of deep space conditions on life beyond the protection of Earth’s atmosphere and magnetosphere.

The spacecraft’s biosensor instrument collects data about the radiation in deep space. Over a year and a half after its launch in Nov. 2022, BioSentinel retreats farther away from Earth, providing data of increasing value to scientists.

“Even though the biological part of the BioSentinel mission was completed a few months after launch, we believe that there is significant scientific value in continuing with the mission,” said Santa Maria.

“The fact that the CubeSat continues to operate and that we can communicate with it, highlights the potential use of the spacecraft and many of its subsystems and components for future long-term missions beyond low Earth orbit.”

When we see auroras in the sky, they can serve as a stunning reminder of all the forces we cannot see that govern our cosmic neighborhood. As NASA and its partners seek to understand more about space environments, platforms like BioSentinel are essential to learn more about the risks of surviving beyond Earth’s sphere of protection.

A newly published study by researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst estimates that it can cost small and mid-sized food producers tens of thousands of dollars to meet new food safety standards that prescribe proactive measures to ensure the safety of the U.S. food supply. The research is the first to assign an estimated dollar amount to compliance.

The Preventive Controls for Human Food Rule (PCHF), the first phases of which took effect starting in 2016, lays out the steps that large producers must take to comply with requirements related to everything from sanitation and food-allergen controls to recordkeeping and hazard identification. Smaller producers are exempt from some requirements but not others.

This ambiguity has left producers that are too small to have a dedicated compliance unit with little information about costs associated with PCHF, and in some cases, even about the requirements themselves.

Working with 81 small and mid-sized food producers in the Northeast, the research team modified existing food safety training materials to include supplemental information about planning, implementation and management costs associated with adopting the new standards.

The study found that initial costs averaged $21,932 per business, followed by ongoing costs of nearly $8,000 per year, and that even modest efforts to fill the content gap can reduce cost barriers for businesses seeking to follow the new rules. The paper is published in PLOS ONE.

“Small food manufacturers are passionate about what they do and want to have the safest products possible, but the complexity of these new standards has bogged some of them down,” says Jill Ann Fitzsimmons, research assistant professor in the Department of Resource Economics at UMass Amherst, who co-authored the study.

Food safety is not a one-size-fits-all decision for businesses, adds co-author Amanda Kinchla, extension professor at UMass Amherst. “My hope is that this research motivates processors to take the thoughtful investment of time and effort in identifying the true risks associated with their food and implement a management plan to address them.”

In response to the significant growth in local and regional food systems, the U.S. Department of Agriculture recently decided to invest in Food Business Centers across the country to support small food businesses. The centers will use the latest research to help small food businesses be successful.

Fitzsimmons and Kinchla say their work illustrates that the centers can play a key role in helping small businesses understand food safety costs, particularly considering that businesses seeking to grow may wish to comply with standards imposed by supermarkets and other outlets for their products, even if they are exempt from parts of PCHF.

“If you want to scale up and sell to Whole Foods or a regional supermarket chain, they have their own sets of standards and you’re probably going to have to implement these same rules—not for the federal government, but to get your products on retailers’ shelves,” Fitzsimmons adds.

“Demystifying the costs associated with the rule empowers producers to embrace food safety as part of their business culture,” says Kate Minifie, food entrepreneurship program manager with the Western Massachusetts Food Processing Center, which participated in the study. The nonprofit food business incubator works with 50–60 clients annually to bring their products to market, ranging from organic produce to hot fudge.

Training materials from the study are now posted online to help businesses navigate the new standards.

Within teams, organizations, markets and online communities, ideas from a larger group can help to solve complex problems. Large language models (LLMs) are emerging as powerful tools to unlock even greater potential. Picture an online forum where thousands of voices contribute to a solution, and an LLM synthesizes these diverse insights into a cohesive, actionable plan.

A new paper highlights how LLMs can reshape collective intelligence, which is a shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration, collective efforts, and competition of many individuals and appears in consensus decision making; offering enhanced capabilities and potential risks. This paper, co-authored by researchers at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University and several other institutions, articulates the impact of LLMs on group decision making and problem-solving.

Published in Nature Human Behavior, the research highlights the dual nature of LLMs as tools and products of collective intelligence, emphasizing their role in information aggregation and communication.

“LLMs provide unique opportunities for enhancing group collaboration and decision making, but their use requires careful consideration to maintain diversity and avoid potential pitfalls,” said Anita Williams Woolley, a co-author on the paper and professor of organizational behavior at the Tepper School.

Woolley and her co-authors considered how LLMs process and create text, particularly their impact on collective intelligence. For example, LLMs can make it easier for people from different backgrounds and languages to communicate, which means groups can collaborate more effectively. This technology helps share ideas and information smoothly, leading to more inclusive and productive online interactions.

While LLMs offer many benefits, they also present challenges, such as ensuring that all voices are heard equally.

“Because LLMs learn from available online information, they can sometimes overlook minority perspectives or emphasize the most common opinions, which can create a false sense of agreement,” said Jason Burton, an assistant professor at Copenhagen Business School.

Another issue is that LLMs can spread incorrect information if not properly managed because they learn from the vast and varied content available online, which often includes false or misleading data.

Without careful oversight and regular updates to ensure data accuracy, LLMs can perpetuate and even amplify misinformation, making it crucial to manage these tools responsibly to avoid misleading outcomes in collective decision-making processes.

The article emphasizes the importance of further exploring the ethical and practical implications of LLMs, especially in policymaking and public discussions. The researchers advocate for the development of guidelines for using LLMs responsibly, supporting group intelligence while maintaining individual diversity and expression.

Over six missions to the moon, from 1969 to 1972, Apollo astronauts collected more than 800 pounds of lunar rock and soil. Chemical and isotopic analysis of that material showed that it was similar to the rock and soil on Earth: calcium-rich, basaltic and dating to about 60 million years after the solar system formed.

Using that data, the planetary scientists who gathered at the Kona Conference in Hawaii in 1984 came to the consensus that the moon formed from debris after a collision on the young Earth.

But that might not be the moon’s true origin story, according to two Penn State researchers. New research published in The Planetary Science Journal by Darren Williams, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State Behrend, and Michael Zugger, a senior research engineer at the Applied Research Lab at Penn State, offers another possibility: That the moon was captured during a close encounter between a young Earth and a terrestrial binary—the moon and another rocky object.

“The Kona Conference set the narrative for 40 years,” Williams said. But questions still lingered. For example, a moon that forms from a planetary collision, taking shape as debris clumps together in a ring, should orbit above the planet’s equator. Earth’s moon orbits in a different plane.

“The moon is more in line with the sun than it is with the Earth’s equator,” Williams said.

In the alternative binary-exchange capture theory, the researchers said, Earth’s gravity separated the binary, snagging one of the objects—the moon—and making it a satellite that orbits in its current plane.

There is evidence of this happening elsewhere in the solar system, Williams said, pointing to Triton, the largest of Neptune’s moons. The reigning hypothesis in the field is that Triton was pulled into orbit from the Kuiper Belt, where 1 of every 10 objects is thought to be a binary.

Triton orbits Neptune in a retrograde orbit, moving in the opposite direction of the planet’s rotation. Its orbit is also significantly tilted, angled 67 degrees from Neptune’s equator.

Williams and Zugger determined that Earth could have captured a satellite even larger than the moon—an object the size of Mercury or even Mars—but the resulting orbit might not have been stable.

The problem is that the “capture” orbit—the one the moon follows—began as an elongated ellipse, rather than a circle. Over time, influenced by extreme tides, the shape of the orbit changed.

“Today, the Earth tide is ahead of the moon,” Williams said. “High tide accelerates the orbit. It gives it a pulse, a little bit of boost. Over time, the moon drifts a bit farther away.”

The effect is reversed if the moon is closer to Earth, as it would have been immediately after capture. By calculating tidal changes and the orbit’s size and shape, the researchers determined that the moon’s initial elliptical orbit contracted over a timescale of thousands of years.

The orbit also became more circular, rounding its path until the lunar spin locked into its orbit around the Earth, as it is today.

At that point, Williams said, the tidal evolution likely reversed, and the moon began to gradually drift away.

Every year, he said, the moon moves 3 centimeters farther from Earth. At its current distance from Earth—239,000 miles—the moon now feels a significant tug from the sun’s gravity.

“The moon is now so far away that both the sun and Earth are competing for its attention,” Williams said. “Both are pulling on it.”

His calculations show that, mathematically, a binary-exchange captured satellite could behave as Earth’s moon does. But he’s not certain that’s how the moon came to be.

“No one knows how the moon was formed,” he said. “For the last four decades, we have had one possibility for how it got there. Now, we have two. This opens a treasure trove of new questions and opportunities for further study.”

Genetically engineered bacteria can work together to spot prime numbers, identify vowels or even work out the maximum number of slices a pizza can be cut into. The researchers behind the study say tiny biological computers like these can outcompete traditional computer chips in terms of both size and cost.

Sangram Bagh and his colleagues at the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics in Kolkata, India, genetically engineered bacteria derived from Escherichia coli that could be combined in various ways to solve problems. These…

While working under Erika Rader, an assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Spatial Sciences at University of Idaho, a postdoctoral researcher identified a volcanic vent on Mars as a potential spatter cone and compared it to a spatter cone formed during the 2021 eruption of Fagradalsfjall in Iceland.

The study is published in the journal Icarus.

Through a detailed morphological investigation and ballistic modeling, Ian T.W. Flynn discovered the Martian volcanic feature strongly resembles spatter cones found on Earth.

“Spatter cones are so common on Earth that it seemed extremely unlikely that they simply didn’t exist on Mars,” Rader said. “Since spatter cones can only form in the right conditions, their presence gives us a benchmark to shoot for when simulating Martian volcanoes.”

Spatter cones are created by hot lumps of flying lava falling to the surface during explosive volcanic eruptions, specifically during sustained periods of lava fountaining. They are common features on Earth—including in Idaho, most notably at Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve—and have long been suspected to be on Mars as well. However, until now, there wasn’t solid evidence of their existence.

“The similarity between the Mars and Icelandic spatter cones indicates that the eruption dynamics occurring in Iceland, over the last several years, also occurred on Mars,” Flynn said. “This is exciting as it expands the range of volcanic eruption styles possible on Mars.”

This discovery can give us clues about how volcanic eruptions happened on Mars, specifically regarding the gases in the magma and the environmental conditions at the time the eruption occurred. It’s also further confirmation that Icelandic—and Idahoan—volcanoes are erupting now the way volcanoes erupted millions of years ago on Mars.

“We are thrilled about this discovery because it fills a distinct observational gap in Martian volcanology, and it lays the groundwork for future investigations of spatter features on Mars,” Flynn said.

Chemists from the National University of Singapore (NUS) have developed an iron-catalyzed method that overcomes a significant challenge in the sustainable synthesis of trisubstituted Z-alkenes by inserting two alkyl chemical groups into a type of compound called allenes. The findings were published in the journal Nature Synthesis.

Trisubstituted alkenes are major constituents of biologically active molecules and serve as key substrates for a broad range of stereospecific reactions that form sp³-hybridized scaffolds. However, catalytic methods that selectively produce the Z-isomers of these alkenes are rare. This is because the Z-isomers are energetically less stable than their E-isomer counterparts. Overcoming this thermodynamic bias requires a kinetically controlled catalytic process.

A research team led by Associate Professor Koh Ming Joo, from the Department of Chemistry at NUS has developed a new method that harnesses an affordable and readily available bisphosphine–iron catalyst to merge allenes with other simple chemical building blocks, specifically the sp³-hybridized organohalides and organozinc reagents.

This multicomponent strategy allows them to add various aliphatic groups to the allene while controlling both site and Z-selectivity. Furthermore, the use of catalysts derived from iron, a non-toxic, abundant, and inexpensive transition metal, enhances the economic and environmental appeal of this green protocol.

The team also applied their newly developed method to simplify the preparation of a glucosylceramide synthase inhibitor containing a trisubstituted Z-alkene, where the Z-configuration is vital for its bioactivity.

This research was carried out in collaboration with Dr. Xinglong Zhang from The Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Institute of High Performance Computing at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A^∗STAR).

Prof Koh said, “By providing a straightforward way to access trisubstituted Z-alkenes, our method not only bridges an important gap in the literature, but also enables meaningful investigation of these prized but difficult-to-obtain hydrocarbon compounds in routine experimental studies for applications such as drug discovery.”

“Our studies also suggest a unique mechanism involving outer-sphere radical-mediated alkylferration, followed by inner-sphere carbon-carbon bond formation, offering critical insights for designing kinetically controlled reactions of allenes and other π-systems,” added Prof Koh.

Building on these insights, the research team is designing other multicomponent transformations that upgrade abundant raw materials into value-added chemical products for various industrial applications.

Earth will capture a miniature, “second moon” this week, according to NASA scientists.

The new moon is actually a tiny asteroid dubbed 2024 PT5. It will start orbiting the planet in a horseshoe path and stick around for a little less than two months before escaping Earth’s gravitational pull and going back to its regular orbit around the sun.

“According to the latest data available from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Horizons System, the temporary capture will start at 15:54 EDT (on Sunday) and will end at 11:43 EDT on November 25,” mini-moon event expert and Universidad Complutense de Madrid professor Carlos de la Fuente Marcos told Space.com.

2024 PT5 is part of “the Arjuna asteroid belt, a secondary asteroid belt made of space rocks that follow orbits very similar to that of Earth at an average distance to the sun of about 93 million miles,” Marcos said.

He added that the asteroid, which poses no threat to the planet, will travel about 2,200 miles per hour while maintaining a distance of around 2.8 million miles from Earth. By comparison, the average distance between the Earth and the moon is 238,855 miles. The moon is also considerably larger, about 2,159 miles in diameter compared to the asteroid’s slim 37-foot width.

Unlike the moon, 2024 PT5 won’t be observable to the casual stargazer because of its size.

“The object is too small and dim for typical amateur telescopes and binoculars. However, the object is well within the brightness range of typical telescopes used by professional astronomers,” Marcos said.

NASA’s Asteroid Terrestrial-Impact Last Alert System first spotted the asteroid Aug. 7.

Mini-moons have occurred in the past. The 2022 NX1 asteroid joined Earth’s orbit in 1981 and 2022, according to BBC News.

“This story highlights just how busy our solar system is and how much there is out there that we haven’t discovered, because this asteroid was only discovered this year,” astronomer and podcaster Dr. Jennifer Millard told BBC News.

2024 New York Daily News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Cassandra Dean and Alexis Dean are fourth-year students with much in common. They are fraternal twins who enrolled at Northeastern University together.

They are both majoring in health sciences as honors students. At Northeastern they joined the same research team. They were hired for the same emergency department co-op at Mass General Hospital. They went on the same Dialogue of Civilizations last summer. And they’re now applying to many of the same physician assistant programs.

“Alexis and Cassandra believe they made independent decisions about where to go to college, their majors and career plans,” says Laurie Kramer, a Northeastern professor of applied psychology. “Yet they’ve made the same exact choices about their futures on multiple occasions.”

The Dean twins, who had been assigned work study jobs at Northeastern’s John Martinson Honors Program, were hungry for perspective on their relationship. How had so many independent choices yielded so many identical results?

They conveniently were able to seek advice and support from Kramer because she was directing the University Honors Program.

“It was always so interesting because during that time we were all wearing masks,” Kramer says of the COVID-19 era. “They would be in the office and literally I could not tell them apart while they had their masks on. I had to check the schedule to see which one was at the desk that day.”

The Deans turned to Kramer for help in creating a research project that focused on how twins make decisions about college.

Their study, “Forging one’s identity as a twin: Balancing sibling cohesion and deidentification,” published inJournal of Social and Personal Relationships will be presented at a scholarly conference in November.

“We’re really different people,” insists Cassandra Dean, “but somehow we ended up following this similar path which felt like an accident. And so we were wondering if other twins have experienced anything similar—or if the experience has been different for them.”

‘There’s a balance’

Mounting evidence suggests that siblings influence each other’s development and well-being throughout their lives, says Kramer.

Twins tend to maintain the tightest of all sibling relationships. Yet little is known about how twins influence one another’s development during emerging adulthood, says Kramer.

The Deans’ study provides insight on an important timespan in twins’ lives.

“Going to college is a major life transition and it may represent some of the first opportunities that these young people can carve out what they do, where they go and, most importantly, who they are,” says Kramer.

“When students go to college for the first time, there’s a sense of freedom, an opportunity to make new friends and pursue new interests. We hear a lot from young people as they enter college about how this is the first time that I get to study what I really am passionate about, or the first time that I can explore my identity—maybe my sexual identity or gender identity.

“As we saw in the study, many of the twins saw this as the first time in their lives that they got to choose how close or how distant they could be from their sibling.”

With Northeastern graduate student Melissa Morgan, who was pursuing a master’s degree in applied psychology, the team designed an interview to learn how twins experienced the transition to college. The team performed interviews with 40 individuals, all of them either identical or fraternal twins, and most of them active students at Northeastern.

The findings were mixed, says Kramer, which in itself was revealing.

“I learned that we’ve been thinking about these issues a little bit too simplistically,” Kramer says.

Previous research on twins of college age tended to focus on the either/or question of whether they were imitating each other or focused on pursuing their differences. The key finding of the Northeastern study indicated that both options could be true at the same time.

“Twins very much want to connect with one another,” Kramer says. “They want to preserve that closeness in their relationship, but they also need to find ways to chart their own identities and life plans. There’s a balance that they’re striving for.”

Though most of the twins viewed their close relationship with each other as a strength, a majority of those interviewed were actively seeking to become their own person. Among the 20 sets of twins, only five—all identical twins—were committed to staying strongly connected with each other even as they developed their own romantic relationships and careers.

“They loved the fact that there was someone who would be there with them as they were undergoing the stress of starting college, being in a new environment and making friends,” Kramer says of the twins who participated in the study. “The comfort of someone else knowing you so intimately was priceless. And many of them felt it’s a shame that not everybody has someone like that in their life.

“But then, at the same time, they also wanted to be recognized for their individuality.”

Healthy competition

The duality of living as twins—treasuring the relationship while seeking individuality—rang true to the Deans, who see the differences between them clearly.

“I would say I’m typically more outgoing,” Alexis Dean says.

“And I’m a little bit more reserved,” Cassandra Dean adds. “It’s interesting because if you talk to us together, we use a lot of the same mannerisms and feed off each other’s energy. But if you get to know us separately, you’ll find that we’re actually really different.”

The study found a level of competition between twins that Kramer assessed as constructive and surprising.

“A lot of these twins would talk about competition as something that they engaged in a lot,” Kramer says. “It was not to be mean or nasty with each other but rather to motivate each other to do their very best. It was a way to monitor how well they were doing relative to their sibling.

“They wanted to do just a little bit better than their sibling—but not so far ahead of their sibling that it would create difficulties for either one of them. So they viewed competition much more positively than previous research had led me to expect.”

The Deans would nod in agreement as they listened to twins explain that sense of healthy competition.

“If Cassandra got a great grade on a test, I would be so happy for her and it would motivate me to do better,” Alexis Dean says. “We’re in all of the same classes because we have the same major, and we’ll study together. If I see her studying, I’ll be like, “I really have to get on that.'”

“If I got a higher grade on the same test,” added Cassandra, turning to speak to her sister, “the negative feeling for me would overshadow the sense of satisfaction that I got from doing better. Because I would know that you didn’t do as well as you wanted to.”

The twin relationship influences development throughout childhood, the Deans learned from their research.

“We found that as twins go through different stages of life side by side, they find what makes them unique and what makes them an individual,” Cassandra Dean says.

“Some twins find that desire to be different at an early point in life, whereas others make it all the way to college or even grad school while living a co-dependent life until they’re ready to go off and find their own way. So we found that it’s more of a developmental process, as opposed to whether you’re trying to be similar or you’re trying to be different.”

The study is affirming for the Deans as they look ahead to their final year together at Northeastern. They are currently applying for physician assistant programs for fall 2025. Will they stay together? Will they separate? They don’t know.

“Getting into these programs is extremely competitive,” Cassandra Dean says. “If we got into the same school and it was the right fit, then I don’t see a situation where we would not [attend together].

“It’s just like with undergrad: We’re both following our own trajectories and they are kind of parallel.”

This story is republished courtesy of Northeastern Global News news.northeastern.edu.