James' World 2

Click the link below the picture

.

At Brooklyn Friends School, progressive Quaker values are part of the curriculum. A required seminar for ninth-grade students encourages them to explore matters of identity and social justice, and there are land acknowledgments on the walls. But a debate over Israel between parents and the school has tested its values. Brooklyn Friends says it is trying not to pick a side, but parents who are critical of Israel say the school has silenced them.

BFS is one of many liberal entities to face a split within its ranks after October 7, including the rift inside the Democratic Party. PEN America, a free-expression group, canceled its prestigious awards and World Voices Festival after writers withdrew, calling on the organization to more strongly condemn Israeli attacks on Palestinian writers and culture. College campuses across the country are convulsed not only by student protesters but by administrators who respond with violent crackdowns.

Nobody has called the police on critical parents at BFS, but there is tension all the same. It stretches as far back as December, when BFS asked Esther Farmer, an activist with Jewish Voice for Peace, to speak at an event honoring Human Rights Day. Farmer says she readily agreed, figuring she had been invited to provide JVP’s anti-Zionist perspective. In her view, that wouldn’t be out of keeping with the school’s pacifist Quaker tradition. “The American Friends Service Committee has been pro-Palestinian and pro-peace for many, many years. And I had a lot of respect for them,” she says.

A few weeks later, BFS withdrew Farmer’s invitation and later canceled the event altogether. “So that was a little surprising because this was the Friends school, and I couldn’t understand what happened there,” Farmer says. Kevin Murungi, the school’s director of global civic engagement and social impact, says they “vetted all the speakers, including Esther, carefully, and told them the spirit of the event that they were attending.”

Farmer wasn’t the only person surprised by her cancellation. Some parents were taken aback when they learned of the decision through a December 8 email from Crissy Cáceres, the head of the school. She wrote that other parents had raised concerns about JVP. “We would never knowingly pursue a course of action that would put any of our students in harm’s way,” Cáceres said.

But what harm could Farmer — who is Jewish — pose to students? “I have to say my experience of that is that’s really what’s antisemitic,” Farmer says. “So we’re only allowed to hear some Jewish voices but not other Jewish voices?”

.

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Ajay Suresh

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

CLIMATEWIRE | Disasters forced more than 26 million people in 148 countries to leave their homes in 2023, underscoring the growing dangers of more frequent floods, storms, wildfires, and droughts.

Last year saw among the highest number of weather-related displacements in the last decade, though fewer than in 2022, according to an annual report by the International Displacement Monitoring Centre. The report, released Tuesday, also found that conflict and violence triggered another 20.5 million displacements in 2023.

Altogether, 75.9 million people were living in “internal displacement” in dozens of countries last year, including tens of millions of people displaced in previous years and still unable to return to their homes.

The report warns that disasters frequently overlap with conflict and violence, dramatically worsening outcomes for affected people. Forty-five countries and territories reported conflict-related displacements in 2023, and all but three of them also reported displacements from disasters as well.

“While the numbers fluctuate year-on-year, disaster-related displacements remain high, in nearly every corner of the world and often intertwined with conflict dynamics in fragile settings,” wrote Robert Piper, special adviser on solutions to internal displacement to the United Nations secretary general, in the report’s forward.

For example, hundreds of thousands of people were displaced by floods last fall in Somalia, a country already wracked by severe drought and long-term civil war.

.

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

As the school year ends, many students will be only too happy to see math classes in their rearview mirrors. It may seem to some of us non-mathematicians that geometry and trigonometry were created by the Greeks as a form of torture, so imagine our amazement when we heard two high school seniors had proved a mathematical puzzle that was thought to be impossible for 2,000 years. 

We met Calcea Johnson and Ne’Kiya Jackson at their all-girls Catholic high school in New Orleans. We expected to find two mathematical prodigies.

Instead, we found at St. Mary’s Academy, all students are told their possibilities are boundless.

Come Mardi Gras season, New Orleans is alive with colorful parades, replete with floats, and beads, and high school marching bands.

In a city where uniqueness is celebrated, St. Mary’s stands out – with young African American women playing trombones and tubas, twirling batons and dancing – doing it all, which defines St. Mary’s, students told us.

Junior Christina Blazio says the school instills in them they have the ability to accomplish anything. 

Christina Blazio: That is kinda a standard here. So we aim very high – like, our aim is excellence for all students. 

The private Catholic elementary and high school sits behind the Sisters of the Holy Family Convent in New Orleans East. The academy was started by an African American nun for young Black women just after the Civil War. The church still supports the school with the help of alumni.

In December 2022, seniors Ne’Kiya Jackson and Calcea Johnson were working on a school-wide math contest that came with a cash prize. tangie

.

Ne’Kiya Jackson and Calcea Johnson

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

.

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

A massive group of sunspots has produced the largest flare of the current solar cycle—but the stunning auroral spectacles that Earth enjoyed in recent days are unlikely to resume, experts say.

The sunspot cluster, known as active region 3664 (AR3664), broke a record on Tuesday when it emitted the largest flare to date of our sun’s current activity cycle. This X8.7-class flare peaked at 12:51 P.M. EDT, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center, which monitors the sun’s activity and its potential impacts on Earth.

A sunspot is a magnetic knot on the sun in which cooler temperatures make that part of the star’s surface appear darker than surrounding areas. These structures often produce solar flares—essentially huge flashes of high-energy light that, if pointed at Earth, can reach our planet in about eight minutes, sometimes trailed by slower-moving energetic particles that are also ejected by the blasts. Sunspots can also spark coronal mass ejections (CMEs), which are enormous clouds of charged plasma that can strike our planet within days of erupting from the sun.

At one point, this particular sunspot region stretched some 16 times the width of Earth. The size drew comparisons to the active region that produced the infamous 1859 Carrington Event, a massive solar storm that interrupted telegraph service worldwide and lit up our planet’s skies with auroral displays. A similar solar storm today could damage vital infrastructure such as power grids, communications systems and GPS navigation satellites. The impacts of AR3664 have been generally benign, however, despite the dramatic outbursts.

Beginning on May 7, AR3664 shot out a spree of half a dozen CMEs that started to reach Earth just after 12:30 P.M. EDT on May 10 and produced stunning auroras that night. The auroras occurred in both hemispheres and stretched as far from our planet’s poles as Puerto Rico and Mexico. The spectacle came with minimal downsides, although airplane flights were rerouted to avoid higher radiation levels near the poles, high-frequency radio systems experienced interference, and farmers who used precision GPS to steer tractors reported glitches as well.

.

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

Rachel Feltman: Cannabis is supposed to help you chill out, but finding the right dose to induce those calming effects is notoriously difficult. Just a little too much can send a cannabis user spinning out in the opposite direction. Recreational users sometimes call this acute anxiety and panic “paranoia,” and it’s a common complaint from people seeking emergency care for cannabis-induced intoxication.

New research offers some hope for folks who have trouble finding a relaxing high—and it comes from a surprising source.

For Science Quickly, this is Rachel Feltman. Scientific American’s associate news editor Allison Parshall is with me to tell us more about these new findings.

Feltman: So I hear you’ve got some exciting news for the anxious weed smokers of the world.

Allison Parshall: Yes!

Feltman: What’s this new study all about?

Parshall: If you’ve ever smoked too much weed or taken one too many THC gummies, you might be familiar with this side effect that stoners have long called paranoia—just, like, this acute feeling of anxiety and panic, like the world is just collapsing around you and/or everything is bad and terrible, and you kind of just have to ride it out. It’s one of the main things that people complain about when they show up for emergency health care after having taken too much cannabis.

Feltman: Sure, yeah.

Parshall: It’s just kind of gnarly.

So basically, in the new study, they found that one of the aromatic compounds in weed—basically it’s just there to smell nice; it’s called d-limonene—can actually reduce these anxious side effects and make people have this paranoia reaction less.

Feltman: You mentioned in your article for Scientific American that some of the researchers were kind of surprised that this aromatic compound had this effect. Why was that?

Parshall: One of the researchers that I talked to—he was the senior researcher; his name was Ryan Vandrey—he was surprised mostly ’cause he was coming at it from more of a skeptical perspective. He wasn’t necessarily expecting that these compounds called terpenes, of which d-limonene is one, would actually have a measurable impact, just because they’re present in such small quantities in cannabis. Like, Vandrey estimated that maybe you get d-limonene as 1 percent of the compounds in any given strain; it depends on the strain.

.

Anaissa Ruiz Tejada/Scientific American

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

At some point during the next several months, a distant, dead star will rapidly grow brighter in a powerful explosion, making it visible from Earth for a short period of time. To observers on the ground, it will look like a new star.

The dead star—which is currently not bright enough to appear in the sky—is one of a pair that orbit each other in a binary system called T Coronae Borealis, or T CrB. Known as a white dwarf, this leftover stellar core is snatching material from its neighboring red giant. When it gathers enough, roughly every 80 years or so, the white dwarf releases energy in a bright outburst, according to NASA.

Astronomers excitedly await the short-lived event. “When T CrB goes off, a large fraction of every telescope in the world is going to be pointed at it,” Bradley Schaefer, an astrophysicist at Louisiana State University, tells Scientific American’s Robin George Andrews.

T CrB is located 3,000 light-years from Earth. The astronomer John Birmingham observed its outburst from western Ireland two explosions ago, in 1866, according to Nicole Mortillaro of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Then, it flared up again in 1946. There’s also evidence that it was seen in 1787 and 1217, per the New York Times’ Robin George Andrews.

Such an event is called a nova—a rapid increase in the brightness of a white dwarf that reignites after years of slumber. These outbursts are different than supernovae, which are much more dramatic. Supernovae occur when a dying star erupts in a release of energy that can briefly outshine galaxies.

In systems like T CrB, a white dwarf is locked in a dance with a red giant, a star that has run out of fuel and begun to die. The red giant swells in size, its temperature and pressure increasing, and starts to eject its outer layers. A lot of this material is hydrogen gas, which gets slurped up by the white dwarf. Eventually, the white dwarf grows hot enough on its surface—a temperature of about 10 million Kelvin—to produce a nuclear explosion.

.

In an artist’s rendering, a red giant star and white dwarf star circle each other. Material ejected from the red giant gathers and heats in the white dwarf, catalyzing a bright explosion. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

With its perpetually upturned pectoral fins and blunt nose, the Dream Chaser looks more like a killer whale than a spacecraft. But unlike an orca, the Dream Chaser will soon be going to orbit: it’s set to take food and supplies to the International Space Station (ISS) later this year when it travels to space for the first time.

The Dream Chaser’s trip to space will make it the latest commercial vehicle to visit the ISS as part of NASA’s “commercial resupply services” program. But leaders at Sierra Space, the company that built this finned craft, have visions that go beyond such deliveries: they hope that someday Dream Chaser will carry people to space and that it can act as a kind of ready-made space program for countries that don’t want to or don’t have the resources to reinvent these particular wheels. Beyond that, Sierra Space officials think Dream Chaser could deliver supplies or people to various places on Earth for the Department of Defense by going from point to point around the world at a faster clip than a typical plane.

But before any of that happens, Dream Chaser must make its maiden voyage, set for sometime later this year.

NASA’s Space Shuttle was the original grocery deliverer and taxi service for the space station. As the shuttle retired in 2011, “we had to go start taking a look at a couple of avenues to support the space station,” says Phil Dempsey, ISS Transportation Integration Office manager. NASA turned to private corporations.

If companies could build space deliverers, NASA could simply buy their services instead of having to build and maintain its own vehicles. NASA’s first phase of contracts went to SpaceX and Orbital ATK (now Northrop Grumman). In the second phase, Sierra Space became the third company to win a contract. Sometime this year, the Dream Chaser will be loaded onto a United Launch Alliance Vulcan Centaur rocket at Cape Canaveral, Fla., whose runway it will land on upon return.

.

Sierra Space

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

Most high school seniors approach the college essay with dread. Either their upbringing hasn’t supplied them with several hundred words of adversity, or worse, they’re afraid that packaging the genuine trauma they’ve experienced is the only way to secure their future. The college counselor at the Brooklyn high school where I’m a writing tutor advises against trauma porn. “Keep it brief,” she says, “and show how you rose above it.”

I started volunteering in New York City schools in my 20s before I had kids of my own. At the time, I liked hanging out with teenagers, whom I sometimes had more interesting conversations with than I did my peers. Often I worked with students who spoke English as a second language or who used slang in their writing, and at first, I was hung up on grammar. Should I correct any deviation from “standard English” to appeal to some Wizard of Oz behind the curtains of a college admissions office? Or should I encourage students to write the way they speak, in pursuit of an authentic voice, that most elusive of literary qualities?

In fact, I was missing the point. One of many lessons the students have taught me is to let the story dictate the voice of the essay. A few years ago, I worked with a boy who claimed to have nothing to write about. His life had been ordinary, he said; nothing had happened to him. I asked if he wanted to try writing about a family member, his favorite school subject, a summer job? He glanced at his phone, his posture and expression suggesting that he’d rather be anywhere but in front of a computer with me. “Hobbies?” I suggested, without much hope. He gave me a shy glance. “I like to box,” he said.

I’ve had this experience with reluctant writers again and again — when a topic clicks with a student, an essay can unfurl spontaneously. Of course, the primary goal of a college essay is to help its author get an education that leads to a career. Changes in testing policies and financial aid have made applying to college more confusing than ever, but essays have remained basically the same. I would argue that they’re much more than an onerous task or rote exercise, and that unlike standardized tests they are infinitely variable and sometimes beautiful. College essays also provide an opportunity to learn precision, clarity, and the process of working toward the truth through multiple revisions.

.

Illustration by Hanneke Rozemuller

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________

Click the link below the picture

.

It’s early morning in the San Gabriel Mountains, and we’re standing in an unremarkable dirt parking lot. The hills around us are dotted with chaparral vegetation, and Los Angeles sprawls just south of here. To me, this looks like any other trailhead in the greater LA area.

But we’re here, at Bear Divide, to witness an incredibly rare spectacle of nature: this is one of the only places in the western United States where you can see bird migration during daylight hours.

When our NPR team arrives, Kelsey Reckling is already here, scanning the horizon for birds. She is a PhD student at UCLA who studies bird migration.

Bear Divide is unique because it’s like a passageway through the wall of the San Gabriels. Birds are funneled through, Reckling says, and fly low enough for researchers to identify, catch, and study the species as they pass. On a really good day, Reckling says, you can see up to 20,000 birds zooming by as they travel north for the summer.

Bear Divide was only discovered as a migration hotspot in 2016. But since then, bird nerds like Reckling have flocked here to catch a glimpse of just one moment along the epic migration journey. Some of the birds we’ll see today are traveling thousands of miles — flying from as far as South America all the way up to Alaska.

As the sun peeks over the horizon, the show begins. I hear a chorus of chirping break the silence of the valley.

“Oh, here we go,” Reckling says as she spots a group of warblers coming. “We’ve got a black-throated gray warbler, a hermit warbler.”

She punches the numbers and species into a tablet, adding to a detailed database of bird sightings she and other researchers will use to study not just birds, but also bigger trends in the natural world.

“You know the canary in the coal mine saying? If we understand what’s happening to birds, we might be able to understand broader changes in the environment, in climate and things like that,” says Ian Davies of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

.

.

.

Click the link below for the article:

.

__________________________________________