Calling all the builders

Tony Tyson’s cameras revealed the universe’s dark contents. Now, with the Rubin Observatory’s 3.2-billion-pixel camera, he’s ready to study dark matter and dark energy in unprecedented detail. The post The Biggest-Ever Digital Camera Is This Cosmologist’s Magnum Opus first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Some not-actively-discouraging news out of Washington DC yesterday:  The Senate appropriations committee is doing its markups of the various funding bills (which all technically originated in the House), and it appears that they have pushed to keep the funding for NASA and NSF (which are bundled in the same bill with the Department of Justice for no obvious reason) at FY24 levels.  See here as well.   This is not yet a done deal within the Senate, but it's better than many alternatives.  If you are a US citizen or permanent resident and one of your senators is on the appropriations committee, please consider calling them to reinforce how devastating massive budget cuts to these agencies would be.  I am told that feedback to any other senators is also valuable, but appropriators are particularly important here. The House appropriations committee has not yet met to mark up their versions.  They had been scheduled to do so earlier this week but punted it for an unknown time.  Their relevant subcommittee membership is here.  Again, if you are a constituent of one of these representatives, your calls would be particularly important, though it doesn't hurt for anyone to make their views heard to their representative.  If the House version aligns with the presidential budget request, then a compromise between the two might still lead to 30% cuts to NSF and NASA, which would (IMO) still be catastrophic for the agencies and US science and competitiveness. This is a marathon, not a sprint.  There are still many looming difficulties - staffing cuts are well underway.   Spending of already appropriated funds at agencies like NSF is way down, leading to the possibility that the executive branch may just order (or not-order-but-effectively-order) agencies not to spend and then claw back the funds.  This year and in future years they could decide to underspend appropriations knowing that any legal resistance will take years and cost a fortune to work its way through the courts.  This appropriations battle is also an annual affair - even if the cuts are forestalled for now (it is unlikely that the executive would veto all the spending bills over science agency cuts), this would have to happen again next year, and so on. Still, right now, there is an opportunity to push against funding cuts.  Failing to try would be a surrender. (Obligatory notice:  yes, I know that there are large-scale budgetary challenges facing the US; I don't think destroying government investment in science and engineering research is an intelligent set of spending cuts.)

For the first time, solar was the largest source of electricity in the EU last month, supplying a record 22 percent of the bloc's power. Read more on E360 →

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