Latest news with #STEM
CBS News
4 hours ago
- Science
- CBS News
Future Leaders winner is a young Coloradan searching for the secrets of the universe
Throughout the school year, CBS Colorado along with our partners, Chevron and Colorado School of Mines, celebrate high school students excelling in science, technology, engineering and math, STEM. The Future Leaders Award comes with $1,000 and a profile on CBS News Colorado. CBS Julia Gao is the latest Future Leaders winner. She's a rising junior at Fairview High School in Boulder. Beyond a tough schedule of Advanced Placement classes, Gao is doing internships with have her working on the college level. "I really like everything about space," she told CBS News Colorado. She works to preserve the light that we can see in space. "I joined Dark Sky to work on night sky conservation efforts and to minimize light pollution where we can so we can preserve the stars," Gao explained. She also revels in the mysteries of space. "One thing that I was really interested in was dark matter, which makes up 70% of our universe, but we don't know anything about its composition," she said. Through an internship at Colorado State University, Gao is working among the physicists who are searching for the sterile neutrino, which could explain dark matter. A neutrino is the most basic subatomic particle from which all things are made. "It basically carries no charge and very minimal mass so it's very hard to find. But, if we do find the sterile neutrino that could be evidence that our understanding of the standard model, which is the model for all subatomic particles is incomplete," she said. Gao is writing a computer program that uses machine learning to look for the signs of the sterile neutrino in images taken by a subatomic particle detector. "It's a really great honor to be part of such a big important global collaboration, and I'm glad to be doing my part," Gao said. In the summer of 2024, in a lab at the University of Colorado Boulder, Gao worked on a study of how oxidative stress impacts brain cells and leads to cancer. Oxidative stress is an imbalance in the body where there are too many unstable molecules called free radicals and not enough antioxidants to neutralize them. "So I was studying different types of biomarkers for oxidative stress and by looking at those biomarkers on MRI scans it could help doctors in the future diagnose brain cancer earlier," Gao told First Alert Meteorologist Lauren Whitney. CBS In addition to these amazing internships, Gao is president of her school's chapter of Mu Alpha Theta, a national math honor society. She's a member of her school's chapter of the Science National Honor Society, and she competes on her school's Science Bowl Team. "You are involved in a lot of things, so why get involved in these particular activities?" Whitney asked. "Because there are a lot of just straight up science clubs or ways to do science, but when you can combine that with helping the people around you, I think that's really impactful," Gao replied. In the 2025-26 school year, Gao and her friend will organize the first Mustang Math Tournament in Colorado. Mustang Math is a national organization that does tournament math competitions for middle school students. Gao hopes to recruit 100 middle school students to participate. "I hope we can inspire middle schoolers to keep pursuing math and not be as daunted," she explained. She also plans to continue her own research in physics and trying to unlock the mysteries of the universe. LINK: Future Leaders CBS Colorado, Chevron, and Colorado School of Mines accept nominations and pick Future Leaders winners from September to April every year.
Forbes
6 hours ago
- Politics
- Forbes
Hank Green Rocks MIT Commencement
Hank Green giving his graduation address This year, the Keystone speaker at MIT's commencement ceremony was a YouTuber. OK, that's pretty reductive in covering this guy's career. Hank Green has a big track record when it comes to technology. In addition to his YouTube channels, including SciShow and Crash Course, he cofounded a company called Complexly dealing in educational media, and runs podcasts, writes novels and promotes STEM learning, also delving into a wide variety of scientific questions and inspiring curiosity, which he did from the podium, too. Hank Green is the most known YouTuber for high school and middle school STEM students. Curiously enough, Green started out with some bone facts – that skeletons have an average of 25,000 calories in them (that's a lot of Big Macs), that 50% of our bones are in our hands and feet, and that there's enough oxygen in a human skeleton to last someone in 24 hours, if we ended up breathing our own bones, which is indeed a very strange scenario. Moving on… Bones aside, much of the meat of Green's speech centered on actual responses provided to him by large numbers of MIT graduates. It turns out that he had circulated a survey among them asking several questions about the future. One of these questions was: 'what is the most MIT thing you did at MIT?' Green revealed to his audience that the most common word in the responses was 'built.' 'You built robots, and bridges, and incubators, and startups, and Geiger counters and a remote-controlled shopping cart and a ukelele and an eight-foot-wide periodic table,' he said. 'Y'all built … a lot. And that is something I found reassuring. We are going to need to do a lot of building.' Green talked about how that jibes with his experience in creating so many projects and always trying to learn new things. 'I've done TikTok dances to Elmo remixes, and I've also published two best-selling science fiction novels,' he said, also referencing his experience writing 'fart listicles.' 'I've interviewed presidents. I've made multiple videos about giraffe sex, and I've sold multiple companies. I helped build an educational media company that provides videos for free to everyone with an internet connection, and our content is used in most American schools.' Green was also frank about what MIT graduates are facing right now. Some of the issues, he noted, are coming from 'inside the house' – he mentioned 'attacks on speech, on science, on higher education, on trans rights, on the federal workforce, on the rule of law…' And then there's the pace of AI acceleration, which naturally makes humans feel uncertain. 'I would want some advice,' he said. With that in mind, he went over four pieces of advice that he had seen listed on the survey: One was to open a Roth IRA. Others were more ideological – such as don't accept any one definition of success, strive for collaboration, and practice resilience, as in this maxim he produced from his response list: 'Even if it probably won't work, try anyway.' And then there's this one: 'Start with the problem, not the solution.' Although he did reach out to a lot of people in preparing his commencement address. Green said he didn't use Claude. He noted that where he asked in the survey about what gives graduates hope, they mentioned people- family and friends, and the innate capabilities of the human mind. 'Do not forget how special and bizarre it is to get to live a human life,' he said, promoting experimentation and boldness, 'consequences be damned.' 'You decide how you orient.' Green also went into more about what we encounter as humans when we try to orient ourselves in the best way. One force, he said, consists of 'powerful mechanisms,' (he cited social media) that don't always align with our own best interests. And then there's the strong capitalist imperative. 'The capitalist impulse is very good at keeping us oriented toward the problems that can be most easily monetized, and that means an over-weighting toward the problems that the most powerful and wealthy people are interested in solving,' he said. I thought that was pretty astute. Overall, Green exhorted graduating students to be attuned to the 'everyday solvable problems of normal people.' 'I desperately hope that you remain curious about our world's intensely diverse and massive problem space,' he said. 'Solvable problems that are not being addressed because our world does not orient us toward them. If you can control your obsessions, you will not just be unstoppable, you will leave this world a much better place than you found it.' Another of his pieces of advice was, again, related to exploring, and not waiting for perfection before starting out on the journey, something I think our students needed to hear. 'Ideas do not belong in your head,' he said. 'They can't help anyone in there. I sometimes see people become addicted to their good idea. They love it so much, they can't bring themselves to expose it to the imperfection of reality. Stop waiting. Get the ideas out. You may fail, but while you fail, you will build new tools.' In conclusion, Green summarized a lot of his exhortations, with a people-centered view: 'When I asked you what you did at MIT, you said you built, but when I asked you what was giving you hope, you did not say 'buildings,' you said 'people.' So, to the graduating Class of 2025, go forth, for yourself, for others, and for this beautiful, bizarre world.' This was really an exceptional address and badly needed at this time. I thought it was wonderfully inspirational to our students. Let's go forth and make this an MIT summer!
WIRED
a day ago
- Politics
- WIRED
Trump's Crackdown on Foreign Student Visas Could Derail Critical AI Research
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during the Memorial Day wreath-laying ceremony at the Memorial Amphitheater in Arlington National Cemetery on May 26, 2025 in Arlington, Virginia. Photograph:Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Wednesday that the US plans to 'aggressively revoke' the visas of Chinese students, including those working in critical fields or with ties to the Chinese Communist Party. Experts warn the move—along with the Trump administration's broader crackdown on international students—could drain American scientific labs of top STEM talent and upend cutting edge research in areas like artificial intelligence. 'If you were aiming to help China beat the US at AI, the first thing you would do is disrupt the flow of top talent from all around the world into the US,' says Helen Toner, director of strategy and foundational research grants at Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology. While it has a population only about a quarter the size of China, 'the US has had a huge asymmetric advantage in attracting the cream of the global crop,' she adds. Several close Trump allies, including Elon Musk, have argued that attracting the best engineers from around the world is essential for the US to maintain its technological dominance. But more populist figures in the White House, like top policy chief Stephen Miller, have long advocated for reducing immigration levels—seemingly at any cost. 'It is almost funny, because the White House has said that artificial intelligence is one of the top priorities for this country, but now they are trying to send the people who are doing this kind of research home,' says Zilin Ma, a PhD student from China studying AI computer interfaces at Harvard University, which has been at the center of the Trump administration's crusade against US colleges. Rubio's announcement came the day after the State Department sent a cable to US embassies ordering them to temporarily suspend scheduling interviews for all prospective international students, regardless of their country of origin. The cable, which was leaked to Politico, said the pause would allow the Trump administration time to consider potentially expanding social media screening procedures for visa applicants. The State Department declined to answer questions from WIRED about changes to its student visa policies. In an unsigned email, the department's press office said it doesn't comment on internal communications and noted that the US government has required visa applicants to share information about their social media accounts since 2019. Vincent Conitzer, a computer scientist specializing in AI at Carnegie Mellon University, says America's ability to attract top talent has been an important and longstanding asset for its domestic tech industry, which is already facing growing international competition. 'The rest of the world has for a long time envied the US for being able to attract the world's best students,' Conitzer says. 'That's not to say that we shouldn't screen students who want to come into this country, but they need to understand that they'll be treated fairly, or none of them are going to come in the first place, and that will hit the US hard—the economy, the technology base, and more.' More than 880,000 international students, mostly from India and China, were enrolled at US colleges and universities in the 2023-24 academic year. Foreigners make up particularly large shares of STEM graduate programs: Over 36 percent of STEM master's degrees and 46 percent of STEM PhDs in the US were awarded to international students in the 2021-2022 academic year, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics. At some US colleges, international students make up the majority of doctoral students in departments like computer science. At the University of Chicago, for example, foreign nationals accounted for 57 percent of newly enrolled computer science PhD students last year, according to data published by the school. Since international students often pay full tuition, they provide funding that schools can then use to expand their programs. As a result, foreign-born students are generally not taking education opportunities from Americans, but rather creating more slots overall, according to a report released earlier this month from the National Foundation for American Policy. Researchers from the nonpartisan think tank estimated that each additional PhD awarded to an international student in a STEM field is "associated with an additional PhD awarded to a domestic student.' Restricting student visas and reducing the number of foreign nationals studying computer science 'will profoundly impact the field in the United States,' says Rebecca Willett, a professor in the University of Chicago whose work focuses on the mathematical and statistical foundations of machine learning. Willett adds that the move 'risks depleting a vital pipeline of skilled professionals, weakening the US workforce, and jeopardizing the nation's position as a global leader in computing technology.' Mehran Sahami, the chair of Stanford University's computer science department, describes the student visa policy changes as 'counterproductive.' He declined to share how many foreign students are enrolled in Stanford's computer science program, which includes both graduate and undergraduate students, but he acknowledges that it's 'a lot.' 'They add a lot to it, and they have for decades. It's a way to bring the best and brightest minds to the US to study, and they end up contributing to the economy afterwards,' Sahami says. But now he worries that talent will 'end up going to other countries.' The vast majority of PhD students from China and India say they intend to stay in the United States after they graduate, while the majority from some other countries, such as Switzerland and Canada, report planning to leave. Foreign-born STEM graduates who remain in the US frequently go on to work at American universities, private tech firms, or become startup founders in Silicon Valley. Immigrants founded or co-founded nearly two-thirds of the top AI companies in the United States, according to a 2023 analysis by the National Foundation for American Policy. William Lazonick, an economist who has extensively studied innovation and global competition, says that the US experienced an influx of foreign students studying STEM disciplines beginning in the 1980s as fields like microelectronics and biopharmaceuticals were undergoing a technological revolution. During the same period, Lazonick says, he observed many American students choosing to enter careers in finance instead of the hard sciences. 'It is my sense, from being a faculty member at both public and private universities in the United States, that foreign students pursuing STEM careers have been critical to the very existence of graduate programs in the relevant science and engineering disciplines,' Lazonick tells WIRED. As the Trump administration works to restrict the flow of international students and slash federal research funding, governments and universities around the world have launched elaborate campaigns to court international students and US scientists, eager to take advantage of a rare opportunity to snap up American talent. 'Hong Kong is trying to attract Harvard students. The UK is setting up scholarships for students,' says Shaun Carver, executive director of International House, a student residential center at the University of California, Berkeley. 'They see this as brain gain. And for us, it's a brain drain."
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Maryland sues Trump administration again, this time challenging scientific program cuts
A student works in a biology laboratory at the University of Maryland in College Park. (Photo by Jess Daninhirsch/Capital News Service) Maryland has joined another lawsuit by multiple states against the Trump administration, this time trying to block its threatened cuts to scientific research. The lawsuit filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in New York, also alleges that the National Science Foundation seeks to eliminate programs designed to increase participation by women and 'individuals from underrepresented groups' in science, technology, engineering and math fields, or STEM. Between 1995 and 2017, under congressionally approved national policy, minority representation in those fields rose from 15% to 35%, the states' suit says. But in an April 18 statement, the NSF announced that 'research projects with more narrow impact, limited to subgroups of people based on protected class or characteristics do not effectuate NSF priorities.' On that same day, the suit said, the foundation issued termination notices for projects that 'seek to increase STEM participation by women, minorities, and people with disabilities; that study misinformation; and that address environmental justice.' It also applied an 'arbitrary' 15% cap on indirect costs for projects, such as lab space, custodial services, biomedical disposal and administrative functions. 'Institutions will not be able to maintain essential research infrastructure and will be forced to significantly scale back or halt research, abandon numerous projects, and lay off staff,' the lawsuit says. Maryland, other states, take more legal actions against Trump administration Colleges and universities are already feeling the impact. Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown said in a statement that the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, has lost nearly $5 million from seven programs that supported fellows, faculty diversification and research. Bowie State University, one of Maryland's four historically Black colleges and universities, saw termination of a program to boost representation of Black males teaching STEM. 'We're taking legal action to stop these devastating cuts so our universities can continue to train the next generation of scientists and engineers who will strengthen our economy, protect public health, and produce groundbreaking research,' Brown said. A representative with the NSF did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday. Similar Trump administration efforts to cap indirect costs at 15% from the National Institutes of Health and U.S. Department of Energy have been temporarily blocked by courts. In addition to Maryland, state signed onto the latest suit are California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington and Wisconsin. On May 5, about 13 universities, the Association of American Universities, American Council on Education, the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities and 13 universities or university systems filed a similar lawsuit against the foundation for trying to make drastic cuts in science research and place a 15% cap on indirect costs. The University of Maryland Eastern Shore represents one of 19 land-grant institutions in the country. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
New York Times
2 days ago
- Business
- New York Times
16 States Sue Trump Over $1.4 Billion in Science Cuts
Sixteen states sued the Trump administration on Wednesday, asking a federal court to block cuts in programs and funding for the National Science Foundation that they argue are critical to maintaining the United States' position as a global leader in science, technology, engineering and math. The states sought the court order on grounds that the foundation's actions violated the law and would cause immediate and irreparable harm to the states involved in the lawsuit. The foundation last month began ending projects that were focused on increasing the participation of women, minorities and people with disabilities in STEM fields, and this month, it said it would cap indirect research costs, like laboratory space and equipment, at 15 percent of granted funds, according to the lawsuit. The states said in court papers that the cuts were 'in complete derogation of the policies and priorities set by Congress.' More than 1,700 research grants at the N.S.F. had been canceled as of Wednesday, according to a list published by the foundation, which amounts to $1.4 billion worth of cuts. 'This administration's attacks on basic science and essential efforts to ensure diversity in STEM will weaken our economy and our national security,' said Attorney General Letitia James of New York, who is leading the legal challenge filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan. 'Putting politics over science will only set our country back,' Ms. James said. A spokeswoman for the National Science Foundation declined to comment on the lawsuit. The federal government has worked to broaden participation of women and minorities in science and technology since at least 1980, upon direction from Congress. According to the lawsuit, that directive has been substantively amended only to also explicitly include people with disabilities. In court papers, the coalition of states said the foundation's directive to cap indirect costs at 15 percent for all N.S.F. research projects awarded to universities would be devastating. The State University of New York, for instance, would lose $18 million, the lawsuit says. Established in 1950, the N.S.F. funds much of the scientific research in the United States. In fiscal year 2024, the agency had a $9 billion budget. The Trump administration's draft budget, published earlier this month, proposed slashing those funds by 55.8 percent. The lawsuit comes amid a series of changes at the foundation as it tries to align its policies with those of the Trump administration, including issuing an updated statement of priorities to exclude the funding of activities supporting diversity, equity and inclusion. Days after the award terminations began, the director of the N.S.F., Sethuraman Panchanathan, announced his resignation. In addition to New York, the other states joining in the lawsuit were California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Wisconsin and Washington.
