It's been a busy time that has cut into my blogging, but I wanted to point out some links from the past couple of weeks. Physics Today has a cover article this past issue about what is colloquially known as static electricity, but what is more technically described as triboelectricity, the transfer of charge between materials by rubbing.  I just wrote about this six months ago, and the detailed mechanisms remain poorly understood.  Large surface charge densities (like \(10^{12}\) electronic charges per square cm) can be created this way on insulators, leading to potential differences large enough to jump a spark from your finger to the door handle.  This can also lead to static electric fields near surfaces that are not small and can reveal local variations in material properties. That leads right into this paper (which I learned about from here) about the extreme shapes of the heads of a family of insects called treehoppers.  These little crawlies have head and body shapes that often have cuspy, pointy bits that stick out - spines, horns, etc.  As we learn early on about electrostatics, elongated and pointy shapes tend to lead to large local electric fields and field gradients.  The argument of this paper is that the spiky body and cranial morphology can help these insects better sense electric field distributions, and this makes it easier for them to find their way and avoid predators.  This manuscript on the arXiv this week is a particularly nice, pedagogical review article (formatted for Rev Mod Phys) about quantum geometry and Berry curvature in condensed matter systems.  I haven't had the chance to read it through, but I think this will end up being very impactful and a true resource for students to learn about these topics. Another very pretty recent preprint is this one, which examines the electronic phase diagram of twisted bilayers of WSe2, with a relative twist angle of 4.6°.  Much attention has been paid to the idea that moiré lattices can be in a regime seemingly well described by a Hubbard-like model, with an on-site Coulomb repulsion energy \(U\) and an electronic bandwidth \(W\).  This paper shows an exceptionally clean example of this, where disorder seems to be very weak, electron temperatures are quite cold, and phase diagrams are revealed that look remarkably like the phenomena seen in the cuprate superconductors (superconducting "domes" as a function of charge density adjacent to antiferromagnetic insulating states, and with "strange metal" linear-in-\(T\) resistance in the normal state near the superconducting charge density).  Results like this make me more optimistic about overcoming some of the major challenges in using twisted van der Waals materials as simulators of hard-to-solve hamilitonians. I was all set to post this earlier today, with no awful news for once about science in the US that I felt compelled to discuss, but I got sidetracked by real work.  Then, late this afternoon, this executive order about federal grants was released.   I can't sugar coat it - it's awful.  Ignoring a large volume of inflammatory rhetoric, it contains this gem, for instance:  "The grant review process itself also undermines the interests of American taxpayers."   It essentially tries to bar any new calls for proposals until a new (and problematic) process is put in place at every agency (see Sect. 3(c)).  Also, it says "All else being equal, preference for discretionary awards should be given to institutions with lower indirect cost rates."  Now, indirect cost rates are set by negotiations between institutions and the government.   Places that only do very small volumes of research have low rates, so get ready for MIT to get fewer grants and Slippery Rock University to get more.  The only certainty is that the nation's lawyers are going to have a field day with all the suits that will come out of this.

The beginning of a RET poster session Research Experience for Teachers (RET) programs are an example of the kind of programs that the National Science Foundation funds which are focused on K12 (and broader) education. This summer I hosted a high school physics teacher in my lab for 6 weeks, where he worked on a brief project, with one of my doctoral students helping out in a mentoring role.  Just yesterday was the big poster session for all of the participants in the program, and it was very enjoyable to talk with a whole cadre of high school science teachers from across the greater Houston area about their projects and their experiences.   Readers may be more familiar with the sibling Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) programs, which give undergraduate students the chance to work for 10 weeks or so in a lab that is very likely not at their home institution.  REUs are a great way for students interested in research to get broad exposure to new topics, meet people and acquire new skills, and for some, figure out whether they like research (and maybe which topics are exciting to them).  The educational goal of REUs is clear:  providing direct research experience to interested undergrads, ideally while advancing a research project and for some small fraction of students resulting in an eventual publication.   RET programs are different:  They are intended as professional development.  The teachers are exposed to new topics, hopefully a fun research environment, and they are encouraged to think carefully about how they can take the concepts they learn and translate those for the classroom.  I am very much not an expert in education research, but there is evidence (see here, for example) that teachers who participate in these programs get a great deal of satisfaction and have lower attrition from teaching professions.  (Note that it's hard to do statistics well on questions like that, since the population of teachers that seek out opportunities like this may be a special subset of the total population of teachers.)  An idea that makes sense to me:  Enhancing the motivation and job satisfaction of a teacher can have a larger cumulative impact on educating students than an individual research project for a single student. It would be a great shame if RET and REU programs are victims of large-scale cuts at NSF.  The NSF is the only science agency with education as part of its mission (at least historically).  All the more reason to try to persuade appropriators to not follow the draconian presidential budget request for the agency.

The US House and Senate appropriations subcommittees have now completed their markups on the bills relevant to the FY26 appropriations for NSF, NASA, and NIST.  The AAAS has an interactive dashboard with current information here if you want to click and look at all the science-related agencies.   Other agencies still need to go through the Senate subcommittees.  Just a reminder of how this is supposed to work.  The House and Senate mark up their own versions of the detailed appropriations bills.  In principle these are passed by each chamber (with the Senate versions for practical purposes requiring 60/100 votes of support because of the filibuster).  Then a conference committee hashes out the differences between the bills, and the conference version of the bills is then voted on by each chamber (again, needing 60/100 votes to pass in the Senate).  Finally, the president signs the spending bills.  In the fantasy land of Schoolhouse Rock, which largely described events until the 1990s, these annual spending bills are supposed to be passed in time for the start of the new fiscal year on October 1.  In practice, Congress has been deeply dysfunctional for years, and there have been a lot of continuing resolutions, late budgets, and mammoth omnibus spending bills.   To summarize: NSF - House recommendation = $6.997B (a 20.7% cut from FY25), Senate = $9B (a 2% increase from FY25).  These are in sharp contrast to the presidential budget request (PBR) of a 55.8% cut. NASA - House = flat from FY25, Senate = $24.9B (0.2% increase).   NIST - House = $1.28B (10.6% increase from FY25), Senate = $1.6B (38.3% increase from FY25) NOAA - House = $5.7B (28.3% increase from FY25), Senate = $6.1B (36.3% increase from FY25) DOE has gone through the House, where the Office of Science is recommending a 1.9% increase, in contrast to a 13.9% cut in the PBR.   If you are eligible and able to do so, please keep pushing.  As I wrote a few days ago, this is a long-term project, since appropriations happen every year.  As long as you're making your opinions known, it's good to push on representatives and senators that they need to hold the agency leadership accountable to actually spend what congress appropriates.  A science post soon....

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.)

Here are a number of items from the past week or so that I think readers of this blog might find interesting: Essentially all the news pertaining to the US federal funding of science continues to be awful.  This article from Science summarizes the situation well, as does this from The Guardian and this editorial in the Washington Post. I do like the idea of a science fair of cancelled grants as a way to try to get alleged bipartisan appropriator notice of just how bad the consequences would be of the proposed cuts.   On a more uplifting note, mathematicians have empirically demonstrated a conjecture originally made by John Conway, that it is possible to make a tetrahedral pyramid that, under gravity, has only one stable orientation.  Quanta has a nice piece on this with a cool animated gif, and here is the actual preprint about it.  It's all about mass distributions and moments of inertia about edges.  As others have pointed out including the authors, this could be quite useful for situations like recent lunar lander attempts that seem to have a difficult time not topping over. A paper last week in Nature uses photons and a microcavity to try to test how long it takes photons to tunnel through a classically forbidden region.  In this setup, it is mathematically legit to model the photons as if they have an effective mass, and one can model the barrier they need to traverse in terms of an effective potential energy.  Classically, if the kinetic energy of the particle of interest is less than the potential energy of the barrier, the particle is forbidden inside the barrier.  I've posted about the issue of tunneling time repeatedly over the years (see here for a 2020 post containing links), because I think it's a fascinating problem both conceptually and as a puzzle for experimentalists (how does one truly do a fair test of this?).  The take-away from this paper is, the more classically forbidden the motion, the faster the deduced tunneling time.  This has been seen in other experiments testing this idea.  A key element of novelty in the new paper is the claim that the present experiment seems (according to the authors) to not be reasonably modeled by Bohmian mechanics.  I'd need to read this in more depth to better understand it, as I had thought that Bohmian mechanics applied to problems like this is generally indistinguishable in predictions from conventional quantum mechanics, basically by design. In other non-condensed matter news, there is an interstellar comet transiting the solar system right now.  This is very cool - it's only the third such object detected by humans, but to be fair we've only really been looking for a few years.  This suggests that moderately sized hunks of material are likely passing through from interstellar space all the time, and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will detect a boatload of them.  My inner science fiction fan is hoping that the object changes its orbit at perihelion by mysterious means.   This week is crunch time for a final push on US congressional appropriators to try to influence science agency budgets in FY26.  I urge you to reach out if this matters to you.  Likewise, I think it's more than reasonable to ask congress why the NSF is getting kicked out of its headquarters with no plan for an alternative agency location, so that the HUD secretary can have a palatial second home in that building.