Science

NASA has shut off one of Voyager 2’s scientific instruments to preserve its remaining power as it journeys through interstellar space. The spacecraft, launched on 20 August 1977, is currently positioned 12.8 billion miles from Earth and is exploring beyond the solar system. Since leaving the heliosphere on 5 November 2018, Voyager 2 has been studying the interstellar environment using four active science instruments. However, as the probe’s power supply gradually declines, NASA has had to make the tough decision of deactivating another instrument.

Managing diminishing power supplies

Voyager 2, along with its counterpart Voyager 1, is powered by decaying plutonium, which diminishes its available energy by around 4 watts each year. To extend its operational life, NASA has progressively turned off non-essential systems and some instruments. As of now, six of the spacecraft’s ten original instruments have been deactivated. On September 26, 2024, the decision was made to switch off the plasma science instrument, which had played a pivotal role in confirming the probe’s exit from the heliosphere by detecting the drop in solar particles.

Key data from the plasma science instrument

The plasma science instrument featured four “cups” to measure charged particles, three of which were pointed towards the Sun and monitored solar winds while inside the heliosphere. After the spacecraft moved beyond the heliosphere, these cups stopped collecting data, leaving only one operational. This remaining cup provided useful data at intervals when Voyager 2 performed its periodic 360-degree rotation.

Voyager 2’s future

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory confirmed that the plasma instrument was turned off without any complications, and the spacecraft continues to operate normally. As the remaining instruments collect valuable data, engineers will continue to monitor the probe’s energy reserves to determine when further shutdowns will be necessary, allowing the mission to continue for as long as possible.

Researchers at the University of Bonn and University of Montreal have developed a new type of catalyst and used it in their study to produce methane out of carbon dioxide and water in a highly efficient way using electricity. Methane can be used, for example, to heat apartments or as a starting material in the chemical industry. It is also the main component of natural gas.

If it is produced using green electricity, however, it is largely climate neutral. The insights gained from the model system studied by the researchers can be transferred to large-scale technical catalysts. The system could also be used to produce other important chemical compounds. The study was published in the journal Nature Chemistry.

Many chemical reactions require energy to get started and this energy can be added by, for example, heating the reaction partners or subjecting them to high pressure. “We used electricity as the driving force instead,” explains Prof. Dr. Nikolay Kornienko. “By using climate-friendly electricity, we can produce, for example, methane that doesn’t contribute to global warming.”

The researcher recently moved from the University of Montreal to the Institute of Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Bonn. He started his latest study while still in Canada and concluded it in his new home. “The production of methane—which has the chemical formula CH₄—is challenging because it is necessary to carry out a reaction between a gas and a liquid,” says Kornienko.

In this case, we are talking about carbon dioxide (CO₂) and water (H₂O). The researchers used a gas diffusion electrode to bring these two partners together. In the reaction, it is necessary to separate the two oxygen atoms from the carbon atom and replace them with four hydrogen atoms. The hydrogen is sourced from the water.

Preventing side reactions

The problem with this process is that water would much rather undergo another reaction and will split into hydrogen and oxygen as soon as it is exposed to an electric current. “This is a competing reaction that we have to avoid,” emphasizes Kornienko’s assistant Morgan McKee, who carried out a large proportion of the experiments.

“Otherwise, it would stop us producing any methane. Therefore, we have to prevent the water coming into contact with the electrode. At the same time, we still need the water as a reaction partner.”

This is where the newly developed catalyst—which is deposited onto the electrode—comes into play. It ensures above all that the carbon dioxide reacts more readily and quickly to produce methane. It achieves this with its so-called “active center” that holds the carbon dioxide and—in simple terms—also weakens the bonds between the carbon atom and the two oxygen atoms.

These oxygen atoms are then gradually replaced by four hydrogen atoms in the next step. The catalyst needs water at this stage of the process. However, it also has to keep it at a distance to avoid any undesired side reactions. “In order to achieve this, we bound long molecular side chains to the active center,” explains Prof. Kornienko, who is also a member of the Transdisciplinary Research Area “Matter” at the University of Bonn. “Their chemical structure repels water or, in other words, they are hydrophobic.”

Water-fearing molecular chains

The side chains not only keep the H₂O molecules away from the active center and the electrode but they also act as a sort of conveyor belt.

Figuratively speaking, they snatch hydrogen atoms from the water molecules and transport them to the active center, where they react with the carbon atom. In this way, the CO₂ is converted into CH₄ in several steps.

This process has an efficiency of more than 80% and the reaction produces hardly any undesired side products as a result. Nevertheless, the catalyst is not really suitable for the large-scale production of methane. “The reaction principles we have achieved with this catalyst could, however, be realized in other catalyst materials for use in large-scale technical applications,” says Kornienko.

The researcher believes that methane production is not the only area of application for this method. In his opinion, it could prove more lucrative in the production of other chemical compounds such as ethylene, which is used as the starting material for many plastics.

In the medium term, the new catalyst method could thus be used where possible to make plastic production more environmentally friendly.

Black and Hispanic faculty members seeking promotion at research universities face career-damaging biases, with their scholarly production judged more harshly than that of their peers, according to an initiative co-led by the University of California, Merced that aims to uncover the roots of these biases and develop strategies for change.

Junior professors are generally evaluated and voted on for promotion and tenure by committees comprising senior colleagues. In one of the studies conducted by the research team, results suggest that faculty from underrepresented minorities received 7% more negative votes from committees than their non-minority peers. Further, minority faculty were 44% less likely to receive unanimous votes of approval. The judgment of women minority faculty was particularly harsh.

The findings, published in the journal Nature Human Behavior, are part of a research program co-led by the University of Houston. The program began four years ago to identify bias in academic evaluations. Current research focuses on understanding what drives the biases and developing policies to mitigate them.

The development of a Center for Equity in Faculty Advancement is being led by UC Merced psychology Professor Christiane Spitzmueller, a member of the university’s Health Sciences Research Institute and a lead investigator for the research initiative.

The initiative underscores and partially explains the lack of faculty from underrepresented minorities on U.S. campuses. Blacks and Hispanics account for only 14% of the nation’s assistant professors and 8% of its full professors, while those minorities make up 30% of the U.S. population.

This lack of representation not only hinders professional academics but impacts minority students, who look to faculty members for inspiration and mentoring. Learning from Black and Hispanic professors increases students’ likelihood of pursuing STEM careers or simply remaining on academic paths.

Faculty members’ ability to rise through the ranks and receive tenure—an earned guarantee of continued employment—is important not just for the recipients but for the universities, Spitzmueller said.

“Tenure is crucial for faculty, allowing them the freedom to explore innovative and sometimes controversial research without fear of repercussion,” Spitzmueller said. “It is vital that we rethink how tenure is awarded to ensure equity in the academic system.”

The initiative’s other lead investigators are Professor Juan Madera and Associate Provost Ericka Henderson of the University of Houston and Michelle Penn-Marshall, vice president for research and innovation at Texas Southern University. The initiative leverages the research strength of not just UC Merced, Houston and Texas Southern, but also Texas A&M University, Louisiana State University, Purdue University and Georgia Institute of Technology.

Prior studies have shown that faculty from minority backgrounds continue to face barriers in peer-review and grant-funding processes. The research initiative builds on that knowledge, highlighting how these challenges lead to biased promotion and tenure decisions that can dramatically alter a scholar’s career trajectory.

The team analyzed promotion and tenure decisions for 1,571 faculty members at five universities from 2015–2022. The data included promotion and tenure committee votes along with linguistic analysis of external review letters—an evaluation by an outside scholar of a candidate’s research, teaching and service. The letters are a key part of the evaluation process. The analysis accounted for differences in candidate assessment from campus to campus.

Analysis results challenge assumptions that the lack of minorities among full professors is caused by factors such as a toxic campus atmosphere, social isolation or a lack of professional support. The research initiative suggests the promotion and tenure decision process is in dire need of policies and training that can reduce bias and promote equity.

A transplant of human stem cells sealed a hole in a monkey’s retina, which seems to have improved its vision, offering hope for a new approach to treat a type of age-related sight loss.

As we age, a clear gel-like fluid in the eye can thicken and tug on the retina. This can tear holes in the tissue, causing blurred or patchy vision. Doctors can usually transfer tissue from other parts of the eye into the retinal holes, but in some cases, they reoccur.

To test other approaches, Michiko Mandai at the Kobe City Eye Hospital in Japan and her colleagues grew stem cells derived from a human embryo into cells that were precursors of retinal cells.

They transferred the precursor cells into a 1-millimetre-wide hole in the retina of the right eye of a snow monkey (Macaca fuscata) that had struggled in vision tests in a different study.

Mandai’s team trained the monkey to complete a sight test, using only its right eye, that required it to fix its gaze on one of hundreds of dots as they flashed up on a screen.

Before the transplant, it could fix its gaze on just 1.5 per cent of the dots. Six months after the transplant, it fixed its gaze on between 11 and 26 per cent of the dots across three tests.

The results suggest the transplant improved the monkey’s vision, but obviously the animal cannot explain exactly how much better it is, says Marius Ader at Dresden University of Technology in Germany.

More studies need to be carried out on a larger group of non-human animals, but if these are successful, the approach would probably work in people, as our eyes are very similar to those of other primates, he says.

China has begun construction of a mega constellation that will eventually consist of nearly 14,000 satellites, but the launch of the first 18 is already sparking concerns from astronomers about their impact on the night sky.

The Qianfan mega constellation is intended to beam internet to the ground and rival the likes of SpaceX’s Starlink constellation, which already boasts more than 6000 satellites and has doubled the number of active satellites in space.

When SpaceX first…

Two Just Stop Oil activists were recently jailed for 27 months and 20 months respectively for throwing soup at one of Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers paintings at London’s National Gallery back in October 2022. Some commentators suggested these were overly harsh sentences for a nonviolent protest, while others felt such sentences were appropriate and an important deterrent.

We study activism and its impact (and sometimes have participated in direct actions like these). In our latest research, we looked at 42 climate protests at museums and art galleries in Europe, the US, Canada and Australia between 2022 and 2024. We wanted to know what makes this form of protest so unpopular with the general public, and why climate activists have continued to return to galleries despite, or even because of, the resulting social outrage.

As it happens, we published our work in the journal Protest just a few days before the Just Stop Oil activists were sentenced.

One common theme we found is that such protests are widely criticized because of their supposed irrationality. For instance, in his sentencing remarks in the Sunflowers case, Judge Christopher Hehir spoke for many when he described the soup-throwing action as “criminally idiotic.”

However, we should consider the logic offered by the activists themselves. The video of the action in October 2022 shows one of them, Phoebe Plummer, asking: “What is worth more—art or life? Is [art] worth more than food, more than justice?”

The judge claimed these words revealed “how little the [protesters] cared about Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, or art generally.” This seems an odd misunderstanding. The question of which is worth more—art or life—only warrants interest because the value of life is being compared to objects that are considered to be the most valuable products of human culture. We wouldn’t be having this conversation if Just Stop Oil had thrown soup over a less-heralded artwork.

Why is (apparent) art destruction so powerful?

Throwing soup at paintings is extremely unpopular. We recently commissioned a YouGov poll in which 2,048 representative members of the public were asked about 15 different forms of climate protest. Throwing food at paintings was considered the least justifiable of these protests—less justifiable than sabotaging pipelines, damaging private jets or breaking windows at companies financing oil exploration.

The extreme unpopularity of throwing soup at Sunflowers virtually guaranteed that it would have an audience of millions. Although commentators worried that such an unpopular action would turn people away from the cause, there is no evidence for such an impact. The public may hate the messengers and their actions, but they’re nevertheless exposed to the message.

Indeed, we suspect the reason activists target art is directly related to why it is so unpopular. In academic psychology, terror management theory suggests that damaging revered cultural symbols threatens the psychological defenses we rely on to mitigate existential fears.

Think of how memorials are built to soldiers who die in war, to offer them a form of symbolic immortality (“they shall not grow old”), and the way any threat to desecrate such memorials is met with strong condemnation.

Masterpieces like Sunflowers offer a similar sense of immortality and permanence. In a way, our veneration of his work means that Van Gogh is still alive, and its preservation means our culture will live on after our own demise. This explains why the apparent destruction of art provokes such a strong backlash, and why activists use the spectacle to draw parallels between cultural and environmental preservation.

It seems the symbolic value of the painting was an important factor in Judge Hehir’s sentencing. In his words: “It is not the value of the damage caused to the frame that is the most serious aspect of your offending … [Van Gogh’s] work is part of humanity’s shared cultural treasure … you came within the thickness of a pane of glass of irreparably damaging or even destroying this priceless treasure, and that must be reflected in the sentences I pass.”

Punishment should fit the crime

Another YouGov poll conducted in July 2023 found fewer than 30% of the UK public think prison sentences are appropriate for nonviolent protesters; only 6% favor sentences of “more than a year in prison.” Over twice as many (15%) don’t believe there should be any punishment for nonviolent protest.

The appropriate punishment for radical dissent should be a matter of concern for all of us. Punishment is not only about retribution. It also communicates societal disapproval. Judge Hehir said, “Sentences must be imposed which both adequately punish you for what you did, and what you risked, and which will deter others whose motivations may incline them to similar behavior.”

In the immediate aftermath of the sentencing of Plummer and her co-defendant Anna Holland, another three Just Stop Oil activists visited the same gallery in London. They have been charged with criminal damage after soup was thrown at the protective glass of two other paintings by Van Gogh.

Solidarity protests happened in Norway, Sweden, Canada and Germany. Rather than deterring activists, in the immediate term the sentencing seemed to backfire by causing more protests.

These protests trigger a powerful desire for punishment and condemnation. But society would benefit from a sincere attempt to understand the rationale and motivations of those activists who seem to go beyond the normal bounds of protest. Deterrence will not work for those who are acting by their own moral imperatives. It will not stop those climate activists who are drawn to radical symbolic action in order to interrupt the “business as usual” that is leading toward the destruction of both art and life.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Researchers have developed a way to make one type of plastic material more durable and less likely to shed dangerous microplastics. Their study has identified a secure way to attach chemical additives to polyvinyl chloride (PVC). The work is published in the journal Chem.

Found in everything from toys, construction supplies and medical packaging, PVC plastics currently rank third among the most used plastics worldwide. Despite its widespread use, pure PVC is brittle and sensitive to heat, and manufacturers can only utilize it after stabilizing its properties with other chemicals.

However, these additives, or plasticizers, are only a short-term fix for stabilizing PVC. Over time, plasticizers leach from the plastics, which allows the material to deteriorate into potentially hazardous organics and microplastics. Now, a team led by Christo Sevov, the principal investigator of the study and an associate professor in chemistry and biochemistry at The Ohio State University, has found that using electricity to permanently affix those chemical additives can prevent such unwanted reactions.

“Instead of mixing in those chemicals, our method involves chemically bonding the plasticizer compound directly to PVC by grafting them onto the backbone of the polymer,” said Sevov.

Altering PVC molecules in this way allows for them to become more durable and resistant to chemical changes, eventually leading to materials with more robust properties.

“This is really one of the few examples that we have where there’s this much control over changing the properties of PVC,” said Sevov. “So this is the first step in controllably modifying PVC to give it properties you’re interested in, whether it’s hard, stretchy or soft.”

The team did run into some challenges; synthetic polymer modifications often fail because the reactions were originally developed for small-molecule analogs, not big-molecule analogs such as pure PVC. To solve this, researchers optimized the catalyst they used in their process, and through trial and error, were able to overcome the issues that arise when editing big molecules.

Outside of making leaps in organic chemistry, the team’s work also has implications for the environment, as putting a cap on how quickly plastics degrade can do much to curb the release of microplastics—tiny pieces of plastic debris—into our surroundings.

Today, scientists know that these particles, which have been found to pollute the air, water and our food supply, are harmful both to humans and wildlife. The average person likely ingests between 78,000 and 211,000 of these particles every year.

But as experts are beginning to understand the long-term impact microplastics have on Earth, organic chemists are racing to find ways to phase them out of everyday life, said Sevov.

“Many chemists are shifting their efforts to studying big molecules and developing new chemistries for upcycling, recycling and modifying well-known polymers,” he said. For example, trying to recycle PVC products can cause further degradation to the material due to the high temperatures it takes to convert plastic into something else, so the process isn’t very efficient.

But using Sevov’s method, “You can potentially reuse the material many, many more times before it really begins to fall apart, improving its lifetime and reusability,” he said.

In the future, more control over which materials will be safe for consumers will come once efforts to fix PVC leakage can be reliably scaled up, something that the study emphasizes that, at the moment, is possible with their method alone.

“There’s no better way to do this on the scale you would need for commercial PVC modification because it is an immense process,” said Sevov. “There’s still a lot to play around with before we solve the microplastic situation, though now we’ve laid the groundwork for how to do it.”

Other Ohio State co-authors include Jordan L.S. Zackasee, Valmuri Srivardhan, Blaise L. Truesdell and Elizabeth J. Vrana.

The legacy of the Soviet Union’s collapse plays a greater role in the foreign policies of Georgia and Ukraine than previous studies have suggested. Conducting foreign policy in former Soviet countries can be a major challenge as the Russian state does not accept the new order. These are the findings outlined in the thesis of political scientist Per Ekman from Uppsala University.

“To understand Russia’s war in Ukraine, for example, it is important to see the war as part of a longer historical event. Since their first day of independence, Georgia and Ukraine have had to deal with Russian ambitions to control the region. For many in the West, it took a long time after the end of the Cold War to realize that a significant part of the Russian political leadership had not let go of the idea of controlling the countries that Moscow ruled during the Soviet era,” explains Ekman, doctor of political science at Uppsala University.

The end of the Cold War has often been described as peaceful because it did not lead to a world war. For Georgia and several other Soviet republics, however, the period was far from peaceful, with conflicts in several border regions, including with Russian involvement. In his thesis, Ekman shows how these experiences came to characterize the foreign policy that was subsequently pursued.

In the late 1990s, there was a strong desire in Georgia to create distance from Russia, something which was reinforced after the Rose Revolution in 2003. Russia’s interference in the country’s independence process was perceived by policymakers as highly negative and a main reason behind Georgia losing the conflicts with the breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in the 1990s.

“These early experiences pushed Georgia away from Russia and towards closer cooperation with the US, NATO and the EU, despite Russian protests and the fact that Georgia received no security guarantees from the West,” notes Ekman.

He also posits that Ukraine experienced a completely different situation. Russia certainly put political pressure on Ukraine in negotiations in the 1990s, particularly over the Black Sea Fleet and the Crimean peninsula. Moreover, it took time for the Kremlin to recognize Ukraine’s borders.

But the result was seemingly peaceful agreements, which contributed to a significant proportion of Ukraine’s decision-makers and population favoring a continued pragmatic relationship with Russia, although they also wanted to cooperate with the EU, the US and to some extent NATO.

“There was a minority of Ukrainian politicians who wanted to cut ties with Russia, but the country’s largest party, led by the influential Donetsk Network, rejected future Ukrainian membership of NATO and extended the Russian military presence in Crimea in 2010,” notes Ekman.

“Ukraine’s foreign policy changed monumentally when then-president Viktor Yanukovych rejected the association agreement with the EU, triggering the major Euromaidan protests in 2013. The protests were followed by Russia’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula in 2014. As I show in my thesis, these events resulted in a growing consensus in Ukraine to distance itself from Russia.

“Paradoxically, the Russian leadership’s behavior contributed greatly to Ukraine’s increasingly clear move towards the EU and NATO and away from Russia, something Vladimir Putin said he wanted to avoid at all costs.”

Many of us entered this so-called super-election year with a sense of foreboding. So far, not much has happened to allay those fears. Russia’s war on Ukraine is exacerbating a perception that democracy is threatened in Europe and beyond. In the US, Donald Trump, a presidential candidate with self-professed autocratic tendencies, has faced two assassination attempts. And more broadly, people seem to be losing faith in politics. “Most people from a diverse array of countries around the world lack confidence in the performance of their political institutions,” says a 2024 report by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance.

On many objective measures, too, democracy isn’t functioning as it should. The systems we call democracies tend to favour the rich. Political violence is growing, as is legislative gridlock, and worldwide, elections are becoming less free and fair. Some 30 years after commentators crowed about the triumph of Western liberal democracy, their prediction seems further than ever from being realised. What happened?

According to Lex Paulson at the University Mohammed VI Polytechnic in Rabat, Morocco, we have lost sight of what democracy is. “We have made a terrible confusion between the system known as a republic – which relies on elections, parties and a permanent governing class – and the system known as a democracy, in which citizens directly participate in decisions and rotate power.” The good news, he says, is that we can revive the original dream of government by the people for the people. That is what he and other researchers are trying…

Since the 2020 murder by Minneapolis police of George Floyd brought nationwide calls for change amid concerns that prevailing practices were not grounded in evidence and created harm, policing has been in turmoil. Implementation science (IS) involves integrating effective and evidence-based innovations into routine practice in fields like health care.

Yet despite its potential, IS—and specifically, evidence-based policing (EBP)—remain vastly understudied and unused in police settings. In a new article, researchers provide an orientation to these issues to help practitioners and researchers involved with policing integrate IS into EBP.

The article was written by researchers at Temple University, Brown University, the University of Massachusetts, RTI International, Rhode Island Hospital, and George Mason University. It is published in Police Quarterly.

“Policing is ripe for new methods to examine how to change organizations and how to assess the adoption, implementation, and sustainability of evidence-driven reforms in police settings,” says Brandon del Pozo, assistant professor of medicine and of health services, policy and practice at Brown University’s Warren Alpert Medical School, as well as a research scientist at Rhode Island Hospital, who led the study.

In this article, researchers offer agendas for integrating IS into EBP as police seek to adopt evidence-informed practices that deliver public safety, respect rights, and boost community satisfaction and trust. IS promotes the use of metrics to assess how different police practices influence various outcomes, which provides police leadership with valuable data about their organization.

In the article, researchers describe the historical roots of EBP in an evidence-based approach to health care, demonstrate the commonalities that make IS as natural to policing as to medicine, and survey research on IS in policing. In addition, they adapt a conceptual model of IS to policing, present two IS frameworks available to researchers and practitioners of EBP, and introduce three types of hybrid implementation/effectiveness trials suitable for use in dynamic police settings, as well as case studies.

The article also highlights the importance of the effective de-implementation of substandard or problematic practices as a key aspect of IS and discusses how police practice that fully embraces evidence will be guided by contestable values and norms, with IS providing a way to reconcile this concern. The authors conclude with a research and practice agenda for integrating IS into EBP as police contend with calls to adopt evidence-informed practices, and they address counterinfluences in policing that hamper IS’s effectiveness.

“Evidence-based policing, which aims to identify and adopt police practices supported by scientific evidence, is frequently discussed in policing but has been slow to catch on in the United States,” explains Steven Belenko, professor of criminal justice at Temple University, who coauthored the study.

“De-escalation, procedural justice, hot spot policing, focused deterrence, and virtually any other body of evidence-based practices lend themselves to studying the constructs that ensure they can be implemented with enough fidelity to be effective and sustainable.”