Last week the NSF issued a new memorandum describing the changes that they plan to make in agency programs and operations to implement the Golden Age of Science ideas advocated by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.  It has been reported (Science, Nature) that many scientists are concerned about what is in the memo.  The first words of the Science article: “For many U.S. scientists funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the agency they know and loved died on 10 September.”  I will try to lay out why some people feel that way. The memo outlines changes to operations that will fundamentally alter the character of the agency.  Generally most of the ideas are not a priori bad if the agency were in an environment with greater resources, when experimentation with alternative funding schemes and evaluations was not a less-than-zero-sum proposition.  Instead, these ideas are being put forward at a time when the NSF is underspending (for no obvious reason by the non-technical people in leadership roles) its appropriation for FY26 by around 18%.  This self-imposed budget austerity takes a bad situation (great uncertainty for everyone, drastically reduced staffing, delayed/eliminated/consolidated programs) and makes it considerably worse.    Now this memo outlines plans to take resources away from historically core programs and redirect them to new, untested initiatives, and to do so in ways that don’t always seem internally consistent.    The memo talks about trying to fund certain investigators for longer periods (e.g. five-year awards) with minimal goal direction (so that PIs are free to explore where ever the spirit moves them – across all of NSF’s portfolio, or only in chosen administration priority areas?), but there is no adequate discussion of how those people will be chosen.  At the same time, there is talk of “golden tickets”, where individual reviewers in an already stripped-down review process can earmark some proposals for elevation, again with little explanation of how this will work.  Without careful safeguards, this combination seems problematic, and the assertion that this will lead to higher risk/higher reward research unsupported.   The memo also talks about short-duration, small budget awards for really risky proof-of-concept ideas.  This isn’t crazy and the EAGER program has been good, but the idea that the key to enabling success in high-risk research is to reduce the budget and the timeline doesn’t make much sense to me.     There is a through-line that the agency is trying to treat workforce development as separate and distinct from funding research projects.  As the Science article says, “Traditionally, most graduate students and postdocs are funded through a research grant to their adviser or lab chief. But that will no longer be the case. Instead, the memo says, ‘Talent development funding opportunities may be coordinated with [research]-focused activities, as appropriate, but will be distinct and goal-oriented efforts.’”  The memo mentions nurturing talent through the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship program and proudly talks about how this was just renewed.  What it doesn’t tell you is that it was renewed at a considerably lower level than in previous years, which seems completely at odds with the claim of bolstering the program.  Similarly, the memo talks about expanding access to shared infrastructure like cleanrooms, etc., but stated targeted funding levels of programs like the NQNI are no higher now than they were 12 years ago, not even accounting for inflation. (I assume they will actually make NQNI awards.)  If NSF leadership keeps slashing their own budget, in defiance of congressional appropriations, it won’t matter what their priorities are.  Lastly, let’s talk about “metascience”, the comparative study of different research funding models and practices, with the goal of a “self-improving NSF”.   Again, the essential idea of doing careful studies of alternate funding mechanisms and research team structures and practices to improve research outcomes (not a trivial matter to define) is not bad.  Doing this well is hard, because of several obvious reasons:  How do you define successful research – by scholarly impact, by patents/economic impact, by production of educated scientists, some weighted average of these?  On what timescale do you do this evaluation?  The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paper was hardly cited for decades, and it is now arguably one of the most influential papers of the last hundred years, with enormous impact on quantum science and technology.  How do you have sufficiently large samples and sufficiently long constant overall conditions to get reasonable statistics?   There are strong practitioners of metascience out there, but when the memo says “These efforts ultimately serve a concrete ambition for NSF to double the scientific productivity and impact generated by each federal research dollar by 2036”, how can one take that seriously?   No definitions of productivity or impact, and an implication that there will be optimization and major programmatic changes within less than two cycles of the much-vaunted five-year grants?   The word “ambition” is doing all the work in that sentence.   Oh, and while all this is going on, the agency (among others) has now eliminated language from its integrity policy that used to say that political interference in grants and operations is bad.  I’m sure that’s nothing to worry about. There is tremendous uncertainty in funding from multiple agencies these days, and this has resulted in many universities cutting back on doctoral admissions in the sciences and engineering.  This guarantees that there will be fewer PhD recipients in a few years across these disciplines.  The large majority of PhDs in these areas do not go into academia and instead have formed the base of technical knowhow across diverse sectors of the US and global economy for decades.  Cutting the supply like this will definitely have long-term consequences beyond just the halls of academia, affecting US competitiveness in ways that will take years to unravel.  Adding to this uncertainty is not helpful to anyone. These are among the reasons why many find it hard to read that memo in the context of everything going on and feel optimistic that the proposed changes in NSF operations and direction will lead to a golden era for research.

[Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] I love the periodic table of the elements. I love it because it reveals the deeper order of what seems like an otherwise wildly disparate collection of atoms with different physical forms, chemical properties, and nuclear stabilities. I love it because, even before we actually found the elements that fit into each box, we knew that something did and could even predict some things about those elements before they were ever discovered. And finally, I love it because it’s a bit messy. Not everything lines up perfectly, and in some ways, it’s still a work in progress. In many ways, human-created standards follow that same form, and I want to try and convince you that they deserve the same affection. Let me present the periodic table of standard North American electrical connections. Isn’t it beautiful? I’m fascinated by stuff like this: a diversity of needs and purposes put into a relatively nice, neat order. But why do we need so many? And where do any of these actually get used? Well, I’ve spent the past month reading just about everything I could find on electrical plugs and receptacles to figure those questions out, and I even have a few of them here so I can show you what I learned. I’m Grady, and this is Practical Engineering. Electricity is something we really don’t want to be proprietary. It’s one thing if your charger doesn’t work on your buddy’s cell phone. It’s another thing entirely when you have to rewire your house because you bought a different brand of toaster. The National Electrical Manufacturers Association, or NEMA, was founded in 1926 as a coalition of companies making electrical equipment. Their members realized that life would be better with some standards, so that any company making an electrical device could be reasonably confident that the people who might want to buy that device would be able to use it, and more importantly, use it safely. This didn’t happen overnight. It took a diverse group of manufacturers, engineers, and testing labs to form a consensus around the system we use today. And it’s far from a perfect system. My friends Mehdi and Alec have covered receptacle-related topics on their channels, including the merits and disadvantages of the NEMA designs. But it works pretty well. Well enough that the NEMA connector standards have been adopted not just in the US, but all of North America, Central America, parts of South America, Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, and beyond. Here’s that table again. You probably noticed that every type of plug and receptacle has its own special number. They seem a bit arcane at first glance, but it’s actually a handy naming scheme that’s pretty straightforward to understand. The first number is the configuration that defines the combination of voltage rating, wire count, and grounding style. These numbers are a bit arbitrary, but they kind of represent a certain class of receptacles and plugs. For example, NEMA 1 receptacles are rated for 125 volts and have just 2 poles (a hot and neutral) with no ground. The NEMA 1-15 was the classic North American outlet until the 1960s, and you still see these in older buildings. Lots of devices made today can still use them, especially low-voltage equipment like chargers, and, critically, those without external metal parts. If an energized wire inside the device comes loose and contacts the case, there’s still an insulating barrier protecting someone from being shocked. The reason NEMA 1 receptacles are mostly a thing of the past is what could happen when equipment didn’t have that protection. If a device with a metal enclosure or exposed metal parts had an energized wire come loose, that metal would be energized too. But, critically, it might not create a short circuit. With nowhere for current to flow, the device could just sit there, indefinitely dangerous, until someone happened to touch it, allowing current to flow through them to a lower potential. The ground wire we see in nearly all plugs and receptacles today fixes that specific hazard. Bonding exposed conductive elements and connecting them to ground makes sure that if they somehow become energized, current will flow, a short circuit will form, and protective devices like breakers will activate. Today we use the NEMA 5 standard for the vast majority of receptacles and plugs. Even if you’ve never heard of NEMA or seen the other plugs on the periodic table, you’re almost certainly familiar with this design. They have a 125 volt rating to handle the standard 120 volt service for most electrical devices with a little buffer. They have an energized pole, called the hot; a neutral pole to provide a return path, and a separate ground return that is bonded to the neutral line in the main electrical panel. The ground pin on most outlets is round instead of flat, and that’s the reason why nearly all electrical outlets kind of look like they’re screaming. Or at least they do to me. One thing about NEMA 5, and actually most of the NEMA configurations, is that the outlets have polarity. On the NEMA 5-15, the neutral slot is a bit wider than the hot, making it so the plug can only go in one way. In function, polarity often doesn’t matter for AC circuits. Current travels in both directions, so the equipment inside the device can’t really tell the difference. And some devices, like switch-mode power supplies, don’t care which direction they’re plugged in. Both blades are the same size. For safety, though, a lot of devices do. You really don’t want heating elements, motor coils, and circuit boards energized and waiting for a ground. It’s less hazardous to put the switch on the hot wire so that nothing beyond the cord is energized until it’s turned on. Enforcing polarity at the plug prevents “switched neutrals” along with other issues like electrical noise. The NEMA 5-15 plug and outlet were designed to be backward compatible with the older 1-15 standard. 1-15 plugs work just fine in the modern 5-15 outlets, and there are quite a few interesting compatibility cases like that in the NEMA standards. For example, the “15” in 5-15 refers to the current rating. Nearly every household device and appliance that runs on 120 volts is designed so that it never draws more than 15 amps, and actually, if the device is meant to run for more than 3 hours continuously, like a space heater, it can only draw 80% of that (which is 12 amps if you’re keeping score at home). That limit is obviously fine for most household appliances. But, especially in commercial spaces, it’s not quite enough power for certain devices like kitchen mixers, treadmills, copy machines, and power tools. Of course, we could just change the codes to require 20-amp circuits everywhere, but that has huge implications: larger circuit breakers, heavier-gauge wiring, and more expensive receptacles. And in many cases, it’s just not necessary. So instead, NEMA created a different receptacle and plug for 120-volt, 20-amp circuits, the 5-20. I have a bunch of these in the studio. You can see they have that T shape on the neutral slot. And 20-amp devices have the neutral blade rotated 90 degrees on the plug. But here’s the backward compatibility: regular 15-amp plugs fit into the 5-20 receptacle as well. NEMA 5 has 30 and 50 amp receptacles too, although they aren’t used very often these days because of a quirk about the historic availability of voltage. Today, split phase electrical service is basically standard for residential power. You get two 120-volt hot lines which can be used individually for smaller circuits or combined to get 240-volts for circuits that need more oomph. In the early 20th century, 240-volt service wasn’t always available, so you have these very-high-current 120-volt receptacles that could power heavy commercial cleaning equipment like floor burnishers and blowers, kitchen equipment like warming cabinets and steam tables, and large shop tools like table saws and compressors. Also, not all portable generators run at 240-volts, so older models used the larger NEMA 5 receptacles as well. These are still available and installed in places where, for whatever reason, a higher-voltage circuit is hard to come by. But in most cases, the more power-hungry devices are going to run on 240-volts. That brings us to NEMA 2. Like NEMA 1, these are ungrounded receptacles, but instead of a hot and neutral, they have two hots. Each is 180 degrees out of phase with its neighbor, so you get 240-volts across them, handled with a little cushion by the 250-volt rating. There were 20 and 30 amp receptacles, but, also like NEMA 1, these are mostly obsolete now that a ground is required by code. They’ve been replaced with NEMA 6, which has 15, 20, 30, and 50-amp receptacles and plugs. Of course, with double the voltage, you also get double the power compared to the NEMA 5 equivalents at the same current rating. The 6-15 is common for window or wall-mounted air conditioners. The 6-20 is used for heavier-duty air conditioners plus commercial kitchen equipment and shop tools. The 6-30 is used with large heaters, kilns, and heavy power tools. The 6-50 is kind of the standard welder outlet, plus it’s pretty common these days for level 2 EV chargers, capable of delivering nearly 10 kilowatts of continuous power through the receptacle. Like NEMA 5, the NEMA 6 has some backward compatibility, allowing 6-15 plugs to fit into 6-20 receptacles. This is kind of clever, but it doesn’t work all the way up the different current ratings. Of course a 50-amp outlet could easily handle a 15-amp device. And it would certainly be possible to design a series of outlets where each successive jump in current rating allowed those smaller devices to plug in. But there are two main reasons why they don’t: One is practicality. The blades on plugs aren’t all the same thickness. Designing a single receptacle slot that can safely grip both a thin, 15-amp blade and a massive 50-amp one would make manufacturing more difficult and increase the chances of developing loose connections inside the receptacle over time. Two is safety: circuit breakers are sized to protect everything downstream, including the plug and the appliance cord. If a thin cord on a low-current device develops an internal short, the resistance of that thin wire itself will cap the fault current so that a larger breaker might take much longer to trip or not trip at all. That could allow the wire to reach high enough temperatures to start a fire. Of course you don’t want a high-current device plugged into a lower-current-rated circuit, but if you trace out the things that can go wrong, it turns out that you also don’t want lower-current devices plugged into a high-capacity circuit. So, the plugs and outlets are designed to prevent both cases, except for the 15 and 20 amp situation, where the current is close enough that a breaker should still work as intended. 240 volts are useful to supply more power at the same current rating, but of course it comes at a cost. Higher voltage means more potential, literally, for arcs to occur. Equipment designed to handle the higher voltage needs better insulation and more careful design. Take a clothes dryer for example. You want the extra voltage for the power-hungry heating elements, but all the other stuff inside (like timers, controllers, and clocks) can easily run on 120 and those lower-voltage components are more affordable. That’s where NEMA 10 came in. You get three poles: two hots and a neutral. In that way, you get dual voltage: 240 between the hots and 120 between each hot and neutral. Of course, NEMA 10 receptacles also lack a ground connection, so they’re mostly obsolete. Plenty of houses still have them installed for clothes dryers and kitchen ranges, but since the 1990s, they’ve been supplanted with the NEMA 14 configuration. This is the most widely-used 240-volt standard in North America today. It’s versatile, providing both voltages. And there are a full range of current capacities, allowing you to design a circuit that’s well-suited for a device, from 15 all the way up to 60 amps. The 14-15 is pretty rare. I couldn’t even find someone making the receptacle. The 14-20 is also not that common. Some food service equipment uses this like certain coffee makers. The warmers rely on 240 volts while the fans and timers run on 120. Same with some jobsite heaters and specialized laboratory equipment. The 14-30 is the standard residential electric clothes dryer plug and is often used for EV chargers. Some server and mainframe equipment uses it as well. The 14-50 is the standard residential cooking range and oven plug. It’s also widely used for EV chargers and pretty common at RV campgrounds as well. The 14-60 is more of a commercial or industrial receptacle, used for large kitchen appliances and distribution of power at events like concerts. Single phase electrical service covers nearly all residential and lots of commercial buildings. But, the grid runs on three phases and it’s pretty common for larger commercial buildings and essentially all industrial facilities to have three-phase service. It’s particularly useful for devices that use large motors. And of course, if you have the service, you’re going to need receptacles and plugs for those devices, or at least the ones that aren’t hard-wired. NEMA 11 was the standard for up to 250V with receptacles and plugs ranging from 15 to 50 amps. Those have been replaced by the new NEMA 15, again because of grounding requirements. And this is going to almost always be relatively specialized industrial devices: woodshop and machining tools, laboratory testing equipment, grinders, pumps, dust collectors, heavy welders, plasma cutters, and so on. It’s not stuff most people see in everyday life, and in many cases, each receptacle is going to be custom-installed for a specific piece of equipment. And since hard-wiring equipment directly to the service panel is typically the default, that makes receptacles like these even more rare. You really only see them in places that need a high degree of modularity, allowing for rapid reconfiguration of workspaces like jobsites, certain manufacturing facilities, and short life-cycle equipment that needs to be easily swapped out. There are two main three-phase service classes used in most commercial and industrial buildings in the US. The most common is 208 volts phase to phase, which uses the NEMA 15 configuration. There’s also 480 volts phase to phase, but like I mentioned before, you can get a lower voltage between phase and neutral (in this case, 277 volts). So NEMA 7 has plugs and receptacles specifically for using just one phase from buildings wired with 480-volt, three-phase service. A lot of commercial and industrial lights use these receptacles, like warehouses, factories, and arenas, making them easy to swap out without hard-wiring. Commercial ventilation and air conditioning systems use them too. And just like the dual-voltage 240-volt plugs, there are also dual-voltage three-phase plugs, delivering equipment with all three hot phases plus a neutral so different components can run at different voltages. NEMA 18 has receptacles for 208-volt service, although they don’t have a ground, so they’re mostly obsolete. There are no straight-blade plugs that have replaced NEMA 18. Aligning and inserting a 5-blade plug would be tricky and take a lot of force. And I’ve kind of buried the lede here only talking about the straight-blade NEMA standards. The reality is that a large number of the NEMA receptacles and plugs have an equivalent locking version. These use curved blades that twist inside the receptacle so they can’t be easily pulled out. Actually the locking versions are more common than the straight-blade equivalents in many cases, especially when it comes to portable generators, jobsite equipment, and events where things are always moving around. If your vacuum cleaner unplugs itself because you’ve gone too far into the hallway, that’s usually not a big deal, but if a three-phase 600 volt plasma cutter does the same thing, you can get serious damage from arcing. That’s why the locking standards extend beyond the voltage ratings of the straight-blade ones up to three-phase 600-volt circuits. They even have receptacles for 400-hertz power used in aerospace, submarine, and military systems. Of course, sometimes the standards make themselves. When it comes to RVs and travel trailers, (from what I can gather) the industry had already developed a 120-volt, 30-amp receptacle before NEMA formalized its catalogue of standards. Instead of forcing an entire industry to retool, NEMA just adopted what everyone was already using, calling it the TT-30. TT for travel trailer and 30 for the current capacity. In function, it’s not any different than the NEMA 5-30 receptacle and plug, but you’ll almost never see one of those, because the TT-30 is far more common. It’s a face only an outlet enthusiast could love. I haven’t really talked about the smaller versions of the locking connectors used where space is an issue. And there are even more specialized standards like ship-to-shore power, aircraft, and military uses. Of course, when you look beyond NEMA, there are way more standards out there. But I feel like this is enough to get you excited about the weird, wide world of electrical receptacle standardization. There are all kinds of practical considerations that make it much more complicated than just a 2D chart with voltage on one side and current on the other. Just like the periodic table of the elements, the NEMA connection standards are a bit messy. And that’s what I love about them.

The course of history is affected by many things, including the political and social situations of large groups of people, […]

Rethinking the electric field Have you ever wondered what an electric field actually is?  The electric field is the foundation of most technologies that we rely on every day. From power grids and electronic devices to radio communication and the … Continue reading →

We are less than one month away from the end of the federal fiscal year, and traditionally there are internal deadlines for agencies to allocate their final spending by around September 9. Right now, the NSF is on track to issue about 4000 fewer (!!) awards in FY26 than it did annually back in FY21-FY24, and 2000 fewer than it did in the incredibly tumultuous FY25 (with its government shutdowns and mass cutbacks in agency personnel). This is dire, if like me you are a supporter of the agency and its vital role in the US research ecosystem.   Perhaps even more distressing, the NSF is on track to underspend its FY26 budget appropriation (congressionally approved, presidentially signed) by between $1.25-1.5B, or 15-18%. This is essentially unprecedented - in the past, the NSF has always spent ~ 99% of its appropriation in a given fiscal year. Some large portion of this is from the mid-FY clawbacks that were reported in Science and Nature, supposedly squirreled away to support an as-yet unannounced OSTP "grand challenges" program.   While technically the funds don't go away at the end of September, this kind of underspending raises the possibility of a pocket rescission. OMB and the executive branch have been pushing for massive cuts to the agency; Congress has disagreed. It sure looks like all the "see, don't worry, Congress didn't allow big cuts to the NSF" palliative statements don't hold up very well to scrutiny, if the majority party is content to just give up Article I power to the executive branch.  In this period of complete flood-the-zone craziness, the mainstream news media seemingly doesn't have the bandwidth or interest to report on this; they seem to have judged that it's too obscure, it doesn't play in Peoria, the public doesn't really care. This kind of disruption will have ripple effects that last for many years and affect US scientific and economic competitiveness, and it's happening without much notice. This week's news about an agreement between NIH and DOD to funnel NIH funds for infectious disease to DOD (or, in the official statement, to work together on projects of mutual interest), is at least getting some public attention.  Agencies agreeing to pass around at minimum hundreds of millions of dollars outside congressional oversight or what the appropriations acts say is another example of an Article I crisis, when the majority party basically hands over what are supposed to be congressional powers to executive branch. (An additional sciencey blog post coming soon!)