Latest news with #U.S.NationalScienceFoundation
Yahoo
25-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
World's largest solar telescope gains powerful new 'eye' to study the sun's secrets
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. The world's largest solar telescope has gained a powerful new "eye" that promises deeper views into the workings of our sun than ever before, scientists announced on Thursday (April 24). The Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, which eyes the sun from its perch atop a mountain on the Hawaiian island of Maui, has been sending home stunningly detailed views of the surface of our star. The observatory, which is funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, is designed to scrutinize the solar atmosphere and the sun's magnetic field for tiny features that might reveal answers to some of the fundamental solar mysteries. The telescope's already-sharp vision has now been boosted significantly thanks to a new instrument designed to maximize the information gleaned from the sun's light, scientists said on Thursday. "The instrument is, so to speak, the heart of the solar telescope, which is now finally beating at its final destination," Matthias Schubert, who is the project scientist for the instrument at the Institute for Solar Physics in Germany, said in a statement. The instrument, known as the Visible Tunable Filtergraph, or VTF, is the fifth and most powerful instrument to be added to the Inouye Solar Telescope. It is designed to study the regions of the sun where eruptions ignite — the visible surface, or photosphere, and the invisible layer above, known as chromosphere — with the highest level of precision of any solar observatory. The newly-installed VTF recently looked at the sun for the first time and, even in its ongoing technical test phase, is already delivering on its promise to resolve and image very fine details on the sun, scientists say. The image above features a sunspot on the sun's surface spanning a whopping 241 million square miles (625 million square kilometers), yet each pixel covers 6.2 miles (10 kilometers) on the sun's surface, according to the statement. Sophisticated computer processing during forthcoming science operations from VTF will sharpen the images even more and resolve even smaller structures on the sun, scientists say. Researchers at the Institute for Solar Physics in Germany have been developing VTF for the past 15 years, nearly the same duration as the Inouye Solar Telescope's own development. What makes the instrument so special is its ability to analyze sunlight in exceptional detail. VTF hosts two devices called interferometers that dissect sunlight into its fundamental components. Functioning as a sophisticated color and polarization filter, they select narrow slices of the sun's light spectrum to create hundreds of sharp images per second. The collected data helps scientists unravel the complex interplay between the hot plasma and magnetic fields that drive solar eruptions, according to the statement. RELATED STORIES: — See amazing new sun photos from the world's largest solar telescope — The largest solar telescope on Earth snaps the most detailed image of a sunspot we've ever seen — The Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope: Getting a close-up look at our sun "VTF enables images of unprecedented quality and thus heralds a new era in ground-based solar observation," Sami Solanki, director of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany, which is a partner in the project, said in the statement. The Inouye Solar Telescope is designed to operate for 44 years, which should cover four of the sun's roughly 11-year solar cycles. And in that time, its suite of instruments will likely change. "The real power in the Inouye Solar Telescope is its flexibility, its upgradability," David Boboltz, the associate director for the Daniel Inouye Solar Telescope, previously said. "It's like having a Swiss Army Knife to study the sun."
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Cuts to the National Science Foundation endanger wealth of research
Look closely at your mobile phone or tablet. Touch-screen technology, speech recognition, digital sound recording and the Internet were all developed using funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation. No matter where you live, NSF-supported research has also made your life safer. Engineering studies have reduced earthquake damage and fatalities through better building design. Improved hurricane and tornado forecasts reflect NSF investment in environmental monitoring and computer modeling of weather. NSF-supported resilience studies reduce risks and losses from wildfires. Using NSF funding, scientists have done research that amazes, entertains and enthralls. They have drilled through mile-thick ice sheets to understand the past, visited the wreck of the Titanic and captured images of deep space. NSF investments have made America and American science great. At least 268 Nobel laureates received NSF grants during their careers. The foundation has partnered with agencies across the government since it was created, including those dealing with national security and space exploration. The Federal Reserve estimates that government-supported research from the NSF and other agencies has had a return on investment of 150% to 300% since 1950, meaning for every dollar U.S. taxpayers invested, they got back between $1.50 and $3. However, that funding is now at risk. Since January, layoffs, leadership resignations and a massive proposed reorganization have threatened the integrity and mission of the National Science Foundation. Hundreds of research grants have been terminated. The administration's proposed federal budget for fiscal year 2026 would cut NSF's funding by 55%, an unprecedented reduction that would end federal support for science research across a wide range of disciplines. At my own geology lab, I have seen NSF grants catalyze research and the work of dozens of students who have collected data that's now used to reduce risks from earthquakes, floods, landslides, erosion, sea-level rise and melting glaciers. I have also served on advisory committees and review panels for the NSF over the past 30 years and have seen the value the foundation produces for the American people. American science's greatness stemmed from war In the 1940s, with the advent of nuclear weapons, the space race and the intensification of the Cold War, American science and engineering expertise became increasingly critical for national defense. At the time, most basic and applied research was done by the military. Vannevar Bush, an electrical engineer who oversaw military research efforts during World War II, including development of the atomic bomb, had a different idea. He articulated an expansive scientific vision for the United States in Science: The Endless Frontier. The report was a blueprint for an American research juggernaut grounded in the expertise of university faculty, staff and graduate students. On May 10, 1950, after five years of debate and compromise, President Harry Truman signed legislation creating the National Science Foundation and putting Bush's vision to work. Since then, the foundation has become the leading funder of basic research in the United States. NSF's mandate, then as now, was to support basic research and spread funding for science across all 50 states. Expanding America's scientific workforce was and remains integral to American prosperity. By 1952, the foundation was awarding merit fellowships to graduate and postdoctoral scientists from every state. There were compromises. Control of NSF rested with presidential appointees, disappointing Bush. He wanted scientists in charge to avoid political interference with the foundation's research agenda. NSF funding matters to everyone, everywhere Today, American tax dollars supporting science go to every state in the union. The states with the most NSF grants awarded between 2011 and 2024 include several that voted Republican in the 2024 election -- Texas, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania -- and several that voted Democratic, including Massachusetts, New York, Virginia and Colorado. More than 1,800 public and private institutions, scattered across all 50 states, receive NSF funding. The grants pay the salaries of staff, faculty and students, boosting local employment and supporting college towns and cities. For states with major research universities, those grants add up to hundreds of millions of dollars each year. Even states with few universities each see tens of millions of dollars for research. As NSF grant recipients purchase lab supplies and services, those dollars support regional and national economies. When NSF budgets are cut and grants are terminated or never awarded, the harm trickles down and communities suffer. Initial NSF funding cuts are already rippling across the country, affecting both national and local economies in red, blue and purple states alike. An analysis of a February 2025 proposal that would cut about US$5.5 billion from National Institutes of Health grants estimated the ripple effect through college towns and supply chains would cost $6.1 billion in GDP, or total national productivity, and over 46,000 jobs. Uncertain future for American science America's scientific research and training enterprise has enjoyed bipartisan support for decades. Yet, as NSF celebrates its 75th birthday, the future of American science is in doubt. Funding is increasingly uncertain, and politics is driving decisions, as Bush feared 80 years ago. A list of grants terminated by the Trump administration, collected both from government websites and scientists themselves, shows that by early May 2025, NSF had stopped funding more than 1,400 existing grants, totaling over a billion dollars of support for research, research training and education. Most terminated grants focused on education -- the core of science, technology and engineering workforce development critical for supplying highly skilled workers to American companies. For example, NSF provided 1,000 fewer graduate student fellowships in 2025 than in the decade before -- a 50% drop in support for America's best science students. American scientists are responding to NSF's downsizing in diverse ways. Some are pushing back by challenging grant terminations. Others are preparing to leave science or academia. Some are likely to move abroad, taking offers from other nations to recruit American experts. Science organizations and six prior heads of the NSF are calling on Congress to step up and maintain funding for science research and workforce development. If these losses continue, the next generation of American scientists will be fewer in number and less well-prepared to address the needs of a population facing the threat of more extreme weather, future pandemics and the limits to growth imposed by finite natural resources and other planetary limits. Investing in science and engineering is an investment in America. Diminishing NSF and the science it supports will hurt the American economy and the lives of all Americans. Paul Bierman is a professor of natural resources and environmental science at the University of Vermont. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author.
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Unprecedented cuts to the National Science Foundation endanger research that improves economic growth, national security and your life
Look closely at your mobile phone or tablet. Touch-screen technology, speech recognition, digital sound recording and the internet were all developed using funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation. No matter where you live, NSF-supported research has also made your life safer. Engineering studies have reduced earthquake damage and fatalities through better building design. Improved hurricane and tornado forecasts reflect NSF investment in environmental monitoring and computer modeling of weather. NSF-supported resilience studies reduce risks and losses from wildfires. Using NSF funding, scientists have done research that amazes, entertains and enthralls. They have drilled through mile-thick ice sheets to understand the past, visited the wreck of the Titanic and captured images of deep space. NSF investments have made America and American science great. At least 268 Nobel laureates received NSF grants during their careers. The foundation has partnered with agencies across the government since it was created, including those dealing with national security and space exploration. The Federal Reserve estimates that government-supported research from the NSF and other agencies has had a return on investment of 150% to 300% since 1950, meaning for every dollar U.S. taxpayers invested, they got back between $1.50 and $3. However, that funding is now at risk. Since January, layoffs, leadership resignations and a massive proposed reorganization have threatened the integrity and mission of the National Science Foundation. Hundreds of research grants have been canceled. The administration's proposed federal budget for fiscal year 2026 would cut NSF's funding by 55%, an unprecedented reduction that would end federal support for science research across a wide range of discipines. At my own geology lab, I have seen NSF grants catalyze research and the work of dozens of students who have collected data that's now used to reduce risks from earthquakes, floods, landslides, erosion, sea-level rise and melting glaciers. I have also served on advisory committees and review panels for the NSF over the past 30 years and have seen the value the foundation produces for the American people. In the 1940s, with the advent of nuclear weapons, the space race and the intensification of the Cold War, American science and engineering expertise became increasingly critical for national defense. At the time, most basic and applied research was done by the military. Vannevar Bush, an electrical engineer who oversaw military research efforts during World War II, including development of the atomic bomb, had a different idea. He articulated an expansive scientific vision for the United States in Science: The Endless Frontier. The report was a blueprint for an American research juggernaut grounded in the expertise of university faculty, staff and graduate students. On May 10, 1950, after five years of debate and compromise, President Harry Truman signed legislation creating the National Science Foundation and putting Bush's vision to work. Since then, the foundation has become the leading funder of basic research in the United States. NSF's mandate, then as now, was to support basic research and spread funding for science across all 50 states. Expanding America's scientific workforce was and remains integral to American prosperity. By 1952, the foundation was awarding merit fellowships to graduate and postdoctoral scientists from every state. There were compromises. Control of NSF rested with presidential appointees, disappointing Bush. He wanted scientists in charge to avoid political interference with the foundation's research agenda. Today, American tax dollars supporting science go to every state in the union. The states with the most NSF grants awarded between 2011 and 2024 include several that voted Republican in the 2024 election – Texas, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina and Pennsylvania – and several that voted Democratic, including Massachusetts, New York, Virginia and Colorado. More than 1,800 public and private institutions, scattered across all 50 states, receive NSF funding. The grants pay the salaries of staff, faculty and students, boosting local employment and supporting college towns and cities. For states with major research universities, those grants add up to hundreds of millions of dollars each year. Even states with few universities each see tens of millions of dollars for research. As NSF grant recipients purchase lab supplies and services, those dollars support regional and national economies. When NSF budgets are cut and grants are terminated or never awarded, the harm trickles down and communities suffer. Initial NSF funding cuts are already rippling across the country, affecting both national and local economies in red, blue and purple states alike. An analysis of a February 2025 proposal that would cut about US$5.5 billion from National Institutes of Health grants estimated the ripple effect through college towns and supply chains would cost $6.1 billion in GDP, or total national productivity, and over 46,000 jobs. America's scientific research and training enterprise has enjoyed bipartisan support for decades. Yet, as NSF celebrates its 75th birthday, the future of American science is in doubt. Funding is increasingly uncertain, and politics is driving decisions, as Bush feared 80 years ago. A list of grants terminated by the Trump administration, collected both from government websites and scientists themselves, shows that by early May 2025, NSF had stopped funding more than 1,400 existing grants, totaling over a billion dollars of support for research, research training and education. Most terminated grants focused on education – the core of science, technology and engineering workforce development critical for supplying highly skilled workers to American companies. For example, NSF provided 1,000 fewer graduate student fellowships in 2025 than in the decade before − a 50% drop in support for America's best science students. American scientists are responding to NSF's downsizing in diverse ways. Some are pushing back by challenging grant terminations. Others are preparing to leave science or academia. Some are likely to move abroad, taking offers from other nations to recruit American experts. Science organizations and six prior heads of the NSF are calling on Congress to step up and maintain funding for science research and workforce development. If these losses continue, the next generation of American scientists will be fewer in number and less well prepared to address the needs of a population facing the threat of more extreme weather, future pandemics and the limits to growth imposed by finite natural resources and other planetary limits. Investing in science and engineering is an investment in America. Diminishing NSF and the science it supports will hurt the American economy and the lives of all Americans. This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Paul Bierman, University of Vermont Read more: Hurricane forecasts are more accurate than ever – NOAA funding cuts could change that, with a busy storm season coming Basic research advances science, and can also have broader impacts on modern society Cutting funding for science can have consequences for the economy, US technological competitiveness Paul Bierman receives funding from the National Science Foundation.
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
A troubled birthday for the National Science Foundation
The headquarters of the U.S. National Science Foundation in Alexandria, Virginia. | Courtesy of U.S. National Science Foundation Happy 75th birthday, National Science Foundation! On May 10, 1950, Congress established one of the world's best value, highest impact, and, frankly, coolest science agencies. The NSF finances federal research in just about anything that's not health (the National Institutes of Health do that). It's been a bit of a rough birthday party. Elon Musk's 'DOGE' has been cutting research funding right and left, including at least 13 grants at MSU at the last count. The director of NSF just resigned as the Trump administration announced plans to dissolve its 37 specialist divisions. Trump's budget proposes cutting NSF by half. The money that would save? About $5 billion, which isn't that far from the amount of money that the budget wants to give to SpaceX. And of course they are going especially hard after anything that implies a commitment to equity, diversity, or inclusion, whether it's the whole NSF equity division or research on environmental justice in Detroit. Michigan researcher's work on air pollution and racial inequities caught in funding freeze NSF, unlike the Trump administration, doesn't 'give' money to anybody for anything. It chooses grants for research on an enormously competitive basis – in the 2024 fiscal year, only 15.4% of NSF grant applications were funded. The government is paying universities to do the best possible research with NSF money, and it's driving a very hard bargain. When a university, be it Harvard, Grand Valley State, or Albion College, gets a grant, it's not getting a gift of tax money. It's competing very hard for the right to do science that barely breaks even. What does NSF do for us? One measure is direct spending. In Michigan, the NSF spent $262 million in fiscal year 2023. The University of Michigan ($132m), MSU, ($66m), and Michigan Tech ($15m) were the largest recipients, but practically every four-year school in Michigan won NSF support. NSF helps support economic engines for the whole state in the big schools, but equally imagine the seasonal, tourism-dependent economy of the Upper Peninsula without Michigan Tech's success at winning competitive grants for its year-round scientific work. Michigan also wins when the US wins. NSF works for all Americans, and often the whole world. Imagine the auto industry, or pretty much any industry, operating as it does today without 3D printing. NSF funded that. Artificial intelligence? NSF. The MRI machines that help doctors diagnose you? NSF. The Doppler radar technology that saves lives in severe weather and makes aviation far safer by conquering wind shear? NSF. Lasik? NSF. Polar or undersea exploration? NSF. Duolingo's underlying programming? NSF. The internet itself? NSF. The list is a long one, and in each case it means a crucial sector that thrives because NSF took a bet on the underlying science that others commercialized. It should be no surprise, then, that Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas economists found that federal science funding has implied returns between 140% and 210%- a fantastic investment by any standard and one that by design accrues to communities, small businesses, and all of us. What happens when funding is interrupted, or cut? Scientists start to leave science, permanently, after as little as a month of interrupted funding. They certainly can find work, but it will probably be work that underuses their skills. Meanwhile, what happens to the science that does get done when we take away federal funding? Researchers who lose federal support often get private industry funding, which sounds great until we see that it produces lower quality science that is less influential, contains less basic research that leads to breakthroughs, and is more likely to produce a benefit confined to a single business that paid for the research. That America, of stagnant science and profiteering businesses, might appeal to real estate developer Donald Trump and technology hype man Elon Musk. It shouldn't attract the rest of us. Don't forget that science is fast-moving, collaborative, and international. The European Union and some Canadian institutions are directly trying to recruit our scientists. China, a fierce scientific competitor, has for a long time seen many of its best minds move to the US, teach our students and work in our companies, because of the science ecology that the NSF supported. Trump and Musk are giving Beijing an opportunity to reverse the flow as our immigration and higher education policies make the United States an impossible option. Cutting federal funding produces scientific stagnation that benefits only a few, short-termist, businesses. By replacing basic, public research with applied, private, research it makes the rich richer and deprives all of us of breakthroughs that come from basic research. And in a state like Michigan, cutting the NSF makes it all the more likely that we continue our decades-long slide from the technological leaders that we were a century ago. NSF is 75 years young this month. In a better world, we would be strengthening it so it can make our lives even better in the coming years. Unfortunately, we are fighting to protect it, and if we lose the world, and the United States in particular, will be permanently worse off. SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
Forbes
24-04-2025
- Science
- Forbes
See The Jaw-Dropping New Image Of Planet-Sized Spot On The Sun
A narrow-band image of the sun from the Inouye Solar Telescope. Each pixel in the original version ... More of the image corresponds to 6.2 miles 1(0 kilometers) on the sun. The world's largest solar telescope on top of the Haleakala volcano in Hawaii has used a new instrument that took 15 years to build to produce a spectacular first image of the sun. The new test image, above, reveals a cluster of sunspots covering 241 million square miles of the sun's surface, with each pixel representing 6.2 miles (10 kilometers), though the new instrument won't be used regularly for science until next year. It's hoped that it will help solar physicists uncover the underlying physics of the sun and how it drives space weather — which brings northern lights but also threatens infrastructure on Earth, ages satellites and can even harm astronauts. Magnetic disturbances on the sun's surface that can be as big as Earth — as is the case here — sunspots are critical to solar scientists. Solar flares and coronal mass ejections originate in sunspots. Solar flares are intense blasts of radiation that travel at light speed, while CMEs are vast clouds of charged particles that travel more slowly but are a major cause of geomagnetic storms on Earth — which often spark displays of the northern and southern lights. This new image comes from an instrument called the Visible Tunable Filter, which has recently been installed on the U.S. National Science Foundation's Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope on Haleakala. The largest of its type, the VTF captures sunlight signals over a narrow range of frequencies, allowing it to map specific phenomena — such as magnetic fields, solar flares and plasma — at new levels of detail. It can scan different wavelengths and take hundreds of images a second using three cameras, combining the data to produce 3D views of the sun. The VTF was built by scientists at the Institute for Solar Physics in Freiburg, Germany. Solar scientists need to understand what causes geomagnetic disturbances on Earth so they can predict them. 'When powerful solar storms hit Earth, they impact critical infrastructure across the globe and in space," said Carrie Black, NSF program director for the NSF National Solar Observatory. "High-resolution observations of the sun are necessary to improve predictions of such damaging storms." It just so happens that VTF is being debuted just as the sun reaches "solar maximum," the peak of the 11-year solar cycle when its magnetic activity intensifies. It's thought that the solar maximum occurred in October 2024, according to scientists at NOAA and NASA, though the tail of the peak can often bring with it intense magnetic activity. Sunspots on the solar surface — which can be seen by anyone using a pair of solar eclipse glasses — are counted each day by solar scientists, with the number of sunspots indicating how magnetically active the sun is. It's hoped that that with the VTF, the Inouye Solar Telescope will be able to precisely study the regions of the sun where solar flares and CMEs come from, and allow them to unpick the complex interaction of hot plasma flows and changing magnetic fields. 'VTF enables images of unprecedented quality and thus heralds a new era in ground-based solar observation,' said Sami K. Solanki, director at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen,Germany. Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.
