New Tokamak Fusion Reactor turns on in Japan

 What is now the world's largest tokamak (sort of like a toroid shaped reactor) thermonuclear fusion reactor is now working north of Tokyo, Japan. The continued work towards the 'Holy Grail' of energy production is making progress towards the dream of unlimited energy (can get the 'fuel' from water, which is deuterium and tritium, the isotopes of hydrogen), with no risk of meltdowns, no radioactive waste, and no greenhouse gas emissions. This is a big attempt to show fusion is possible, and can scale up to industrial and commercial production levels. Let's hope this works and shows scientists and engineers the next steps of accomplishing this long-term dream! 

For those interested in this, it is a major multidisciplinary area of research and engineering: nuclear and plasma physics, math modeling, nuclear and plasma engineering, mechanical and electrical and computer engineering, civil engineering, environmental sciences, city planning, eventually governmental energy and patent regulations and policy, and so much more!

                                                            From BYJUs.

A Dangerous Era for Science Funding

 Here is how politics instantly affects science (STEM in general) research. At the professional level, most university funding comes through grants. One must write a proposal to foundations, businesses, individuals, or a huge amount from the federal government. The largest amount of federal funding comes through the National Science Foundation, or NSF. But with new directives from the current administration, and its obsession to get rid of anything that they think smells like 'DEI' (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), one can lose their federal funding, and who knows if other legal consequences will be part of this. 

Check out this article to see a LIST OF WORDS that will get a scientific paper FLAGGED FOR DEI. Apparently, federal agencies like NSF, the CDC, and likely every other one, are scrubbing published papers on their websites to remove these words. This is outright censorship, and we all need to be aware of this in K-12 research because so many programs and opportunities to help all sorts of students may have federal funding behind them. This could include anything a school does with colleges, special education, food programs, different grants or fellowships through the Dept. of Education (which is being significantly downsized, with a stated goal of the president to be eliminated), and anything a school is doing that has to do with helping students of color, girls (yes, FEMALE and WOMEN are on the banned list), LGBTQ kids, or any group that is underrepresented in anything...ALL of this can get your work or funding flagged for DEI. 

This is a new era for science research, and we all need to be aware of it. This is dangerous, and is what authoritarians and dictators do to control countries and its citizens - the notion of any ideas that differ from 'the state' are banned and outlawed, and has been done throughout history by all sorts of regimes. Be safe, be strong, and resist this nonsense! 

Interesting experiment to investigate sound from clapping hands

 This is an interesting study into the sound created when we clap our hands. And what's more, this is a potential project setup for research of your own. The technique used was filming the patterns of air coming out from one's clapping hands by using baby powder. If you have access to any level of high-speed video tools, you could study these patterns, and compare them between various shaped objects coming together in a clapping manner. Investigate similarities and differences as functions of shape, size, mass, size of the cavities formed when the two objects come together, and anything else you can think of! If you have 3-D printers, you can design different shaped objects and cavities, and so on. 

Here's a brief video of this technique.