Science/mathematics Archives - Attention to the Unseen

Profits before people: EPA scientists are being pushed to downplay potential risks of household products

From elsewhere — Tue, 09 Jun 2026 00:36:39 +0000

CNN reports: Inside the Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency, scientists say they’re under pressure to alter safety reviews of chemicals commonly found in consumer products like household cleaners and cosmetics to make risks to human health and the environment disappear on paper. Multiple current and former career employees at the EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention recounted being pushed by supervisors to downplay the potential risk of chemicals that are already used in products on shelves. With President...

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White House seeks to impose political test on billions in federal grants

From elsewhere — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 00:46:21 +0000

The New York Times reports: The White House is seeking to exert more control over billions of dollars in annual government grants, aiming to restrict a vast swath of funding — in health, housing, science and transportation — so that it primarily serves the purposes and organizations politically aligned with President Trump. While the administration says that its primary goal is to safeguard taxpayer money, its proposal amounts to a major escalation in its attempt to reimagine the nation’s spending,...

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Trump is destroying ‘the world’s most advanced continuously operating ocean observing systems’

From elsewhere — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 00:45:58 +0000

The New York Times reports: The Trump administration is dismantling a $368 million deep-ocean observation system that was put in place a decade ago to monitor coastal environments, marine ecosystems and powerful currents that affect the global climate. The National Science Foundation said it would send ships in June to begin removing more than 900 deep-sea instruments anchored off Oregon, Washington State, Alaska, North Carolina, and an area between Greenland and Iceland known as the Irminger Sea. Scientists have used...

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Federal judge blocks breakup of National Center for Atmospheric Research

From elsewhere — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 00:45:39 +0000

The Colorado Sun reports: A federal judge in Denver on Monday blocked federal officials from breaking up Boulder’s National Center for Atmospheric Research by handing over a renowned supercomputing center to the University of Wyoming, in a 38-page injunction raking the Trump administration for enacting political revenge on Colorado. Senior U.S. District Judge R. Brooke Jackson issued an injunction because the National Science Foundation divesting the supercomputing center was “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance...

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For Sergiu Klainerman, mathematics is not a human invention

From elsewhere — Thu, 21 May 2026 00:43:33 +0000

Steve Nadis writes: The equations that govern black holes were true before there were black holes. That claim is hotly contested, and cuts through one of the deepest fault lines in the philosophy of mathematics. On one side are those who hold that mathematical structures, including well-established principles and basic geometric shapes like the tetrahedron, exist independently of human thought – not as a language we invented to describe reality, but rather as the substrate of reality itself. On the...

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What do Gödel’s incompleteness theorems truly mean?

From elsewhere — Tue, 19 May 2026 02:30:07 +0000

Natalie Wolchover writes: In 1931, by turning logic on itself, Kurt Gödel proved a pair of theorems that transformed the landscape of knowledge and truth. These “incompleteness theorems” established that no formal system of mathematics — no finite set of rules, or axioms, from which everything is supposed to follow — can ever be complete. There will always be true mathematical statements that don’t logically follow from those axioms. I spent the early weeks of the Covid pandemic learning how...

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Lessons in resistance for the scientific community — a conversation with Timothy Snyder

From elsewhere — Mon, 11 May 2026 00:06:20 +0000

H. Holden Thorp writes: Federal grant cancellations, restrictions on immigration for foreign scientists, and attempts to cut the budgets of science funding agencies by 60%—the past 18 months have been tumultuous for American science. Even after Congress restored the budgets, following the successful lobbying by leaders of the scientific community, universities are still hampered by the slow dispersal of the appropriated funds. Meanwhile, the continual attacks on science and the uncertainty brought on by the Trump administration have put...

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Thoreau the scientist – how environmental research informed ‘Walden’ and later works

From elsewhere — Sun, 10 May 2026 00:31:15 +0000

Henry David Thoreau investigated the Sudbury River as America’s first river scientist. Robert M. Thorson By Robert M. Thorson, University of Connecticut The steam locomotive chugged its way toward Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Aug. 15, 1859. On board was an impatient young scientist wanting to understand the math and science governing how river channels should behave. After disembarking at Harvard College and searching the stacks of its library, Henry David Thoreau checked out “Principes D’Hydraulique,” a three-volume tome of hydraulic engineering....

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What causes lightning? The answer keeps getting more interesting

From elsewhere — Sat, 09 May 2026 00:22:08 +0000

Charlie Wood writes: Before he changed the way we understand lightning on Earth, Joseph Dwyer studied the weather in more cosmic settings. Using the sensors on NASA’s Wind satellite, orbiting a million miles away, he watched flares shoot out from the sun and analyzed the particles that stream from the sun’s surface. But when he relocated to Florida around the turn of the millennium, Dwyer felt ready for something new — something he and his students could investigate on their...

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Physicists discover the most complex forms of ice yet

From elsewhere — Sun, 03 May 2026 01:24:31 +0000

Shalma Wegsman writes: Ice comes in more forms than what you’ll find in a freezer or a glacier. Since 1900, scientists have observed more than 20 phases of ice, many of them shaped under extreme conditions. The growing list includes hot ice and even ice that conducts electricity. Ice is the name for any phase of water that is solid and crystalline, meaning that it has a repeating molecular structure. Over the past decade, computer simulations have predicted tens of...

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