Good article that highlights how institutions review and vet donors. I'm impressed that Harvard refused $$ from Epstein after his 2007 conviction. The school shouldn't be punished for $$ it took before charges came to light.
Politics is the decision making around how to divide and use our shared resources. Addressing climate change in a meaningful way requires rethinking our current approach. It's a fundamentally political issue.
how in the world do FRB's "release enough energy to power the world for three centuries." If we don't know how and when they are happening, how can we measure their energy? Can someone explain?
We measure the energy of signals received at our radio telescopes - our units are Janskys, which correspond to 10^-26 watts per square metre per hertz of bandwidth, and we can calibrate our telescopes using noise diodes or known sources in the sky.
So for FRBs, we get the received brightness, and if we can measure the distance, we can use the basic inverse square scaling to estimate how much energy it had at the source. (Why inverse square? Because the area of a sphere is 4 pi R^2 - if you go twice as far away, the signal is spread out over 4 times the area, and so on.)
The key problem is a distance estimate for the FRBs - we have a pretty precise measurement for FRB 121102 because we identified its host galaxy and measured the redshift to that galaxy, so we know how far away it is. That's now been done for 2 other sources. For the rest, we can use the pulse dispersion, which measures the integrated column density of electrons along the line of sight, along with models for our galaxy and the intergalactic medium, to get some idea. It's not as good, but better than nothing.
This assumes a spherical signal propagation. But signals from antennas, and even from many natural emitters, aren't spherical. It's also possible that the signal is highly directional, like a jet. So, I'm pretty skeptical of these power estimates. For sure the transmitter has a lot of power, but how much exactly? I don't think we can really tell.
Sure, that's an excellent point. In case you read late replies: we recognize this, and parameterize the burst energy [1] by a beaming scale factor, \Delta\Omega/4\pi. (It still drops off as the inverse square, though, as long as you're not in the near field.)
The problem is, while you can reduce the energy requirement by making the beams narrow, that increases the total number of sources by the same factor. When we say that there are between 5000-10,000 FRBs all over the sky every single day, we are referring to FRBs beamed towards us. If you apply a 10% beam, your energy requirement drops by 10x, sure, but the source count goes up by 10x.
Right now, we don't have a large enough plausible progenitor population, even at 1x, for these FRBs. It's a really fun problem.
Our sun for example is emitting enough energy in all directions to power the world for 300 years (over the course of 300 years), and most of it misses us.
Our sun isn't particularly impressive in terms of energy and such compared to other astro-objects, so I feel like these kinda of events releasing so much energy are to be expected.
"Our sun for example is emitting enough energy in all directions to power the world for 300 years (over the course of 300 years), and most of it misses us"
I think you're saying any amount of energy can be produced by any amount of power, if the amount of time is unspecified. Which is true, but not substantive.
I grew up in Southern Utah, just a few miles from the Zion Narrows, and have read of many tragic situations that didn't end nearly as well as this group's story. (Including my own brother on an overnight scouting event). God bless the two hikers who "left before the rescue without giving their names!" I hope the family can find them so they can give them personal thanks.
This is such an important topic. During my years in law school, I oversaw a volunteer mentoring program that brought 5th grade kids from a local Title 1 school into the law building and paired them with law student mentors who helped with homework for 1 hour a week. The year ended with the law students assisting the kids in a mock trial presentation. One of the aims of the program was to help these kids feel comfortable in a setting of Higher Education, and to give them the opportunity to associate with/ask questions of graduate students. Many of the kids had never been on a college campus, or came from homes where no other family member had attended college. The law professor who founded the program, Brett Scharffs, has written more extensively regarding the program, and his findings are much more than simply anecdotal regarding how programs such as these can give kids a leg up, or at least give them a vision of what "can be". I agree whole-heartedly with Paul Tough's statement that higher education and social mobility have become very intertwined.
Just looking at shifts in the national unemployment rate will never render an accurate assessment of the labor market. It simply overlooks how, why, and which folks are leaving jobs or accurately reflect the under-employed.
This science journalism isn't all that bad, actually. The article is clearly about Ivermectin, and never mentions "bacteria killed parasite" - Additionally, Ivermectin and other avermectins are macrocyclic lactones and are derived from the bacterium Streptomyces avermitilis. So even if teh article mentions bacteria... it's still not wrong.
Obermier, who discovered and preserved this site did fantastic work at the the cave of Altamira in the 1920's. He deserves more credit. His work at the Dolmen of Guadalperal wasn't even known about until 40 years later.
