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Category: Science

  • MIL-OSI Global: Solar farms can host up to three times as many birds as crop fields – new research

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Catherine Waite, Research Associate, Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge

    A stonechat on the edge of a solar farm. Joshua Copping

    The UK’s installed capacity of solar power expanded rapidly over the past decade to reach 17.2 gigawatts (GW) in 2024 – enough electricity to power roughly 4 million homes. The government aims to raise solar generation capacity to 70 GW by 2035. And by 2050, the government’s advisers estimate that as much as 90 GW of solar power may be needed to achieve net zero emissions.

    Building solar farms – large-scale installations of solar panels on agricultural land – will have to be done carefully, to avoid exacerbating another environmental crisis: the dwindling variety of wildlife, or biodiversity.

    However, surprisingly few studies have examined the impact of solar farms on biodiversity. Our new research is one of the first to study the impact of solar farms on birds in the UK. And, hectare-for-hectare, we found that solar farms in the farm-rich East Anglian countryside that were managed with biodiversity in mind contained a greater number of bird species, and more birds overall, than surrounding cropland.

    Farmland is frequently disturbed and can be a fraught habitat for wildlife.
    David Calvert/Shutterstock

    During spring 2023, we used the breeding bird survey method to survey solar farms in the East Anglian fens that were under different management styles.

    These sites ranged from intensively managed solar farms, in which the grass surrounding panels is cut or grazed short throughout the year, with no hedgerows or small trees, to mixed-habitat solar farms where infrequent cutting or grazing has allowed wildflowers, trees and hedgerows to grow along boundary fences. For comparison, we also surveyed the surrounding farmland.

    Good habitats for birds

    We found that the number of birds on the mixed-habitat solar farms was typically twice that of the intensively managed sites, and three times higher than adjacent high-yielding cropland. The number of species on mixed-habitat solar farms was 2.5 times higher than both of the alternatives.

    Our study also showed that solar farms offer important habitat for a number of threatened bird species. In fact, birds such as yellowhammer, linnet, greenfinch and corn bunting, which are of particular concern to conservationists due to their declining national populations, were considerably more abundant on mixed-habitat solar farms.

    Perhaps our results aren’t that surprising. After all, the mixed-habitat solar farms we surveyed contained many of the features birds prefer (similar to nature-friendly farms in less intensively farmed areas). These features include hedgerows, which can offer berries to eat and crevices to shelter in, particularly for birds adapted to woodland habitats. The tall and diverse vegetation around the solar panels contains a variety of habitats, with insect prey or seeds for food. The intensively managed cropland and solar farms had none of these features.

    By providing the right habitat, birds have been naturally drawn to these solar farms in an area that sorely lacks it.

    A golden opportunity

    So, solar farms can benefit biodiversity in rural landscapes dominated by intensive agriculture in the UK. Especially when they are designed to allow plants to grow around the panels, and have hedgerows or trees in the margins. Prioritising the needs of wildlife when planning solar farms could help the UK meet its climate commitments while helping nature.

    When grass was allowed to grow long on solar farms, it appeared to encourage birds.
    Joshua Copping

    What’s more, our previous research has shown that the UK has enough land to deploy 90 GW of solar power – enough to meet suggested capacity by 2050 – without damaging bird populations at a national scale or affecting food production. Our new findings should allay public concerns about some of the risks of renewable energy to wildlife.

    We have a golden opportunity for finding multiple functions for land: generating clean energy while restoring biodiversity at the same time.

    Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?

    Get a weekly roundup in your inbox instead. Every Wednesday, The Conversation’s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue. Join the 40,000+ readers who’ve subscribed so far.

    Catherine Waite receives funding from The Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).

    Joshua Copping receives funding from The Natural Environment Resource Council (NERC) and is employed by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB).

    – ref. Solar farms can host up to three times as many birds as crop fields – new research – https://theconversation.com/solar-farms-can-host-up-to-three-times-as-many-birds-as-crop-fields-new-research-249551

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Black women are more likely to die from breast cancer – so why is breast screening attendance still a problem?

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Anietie Aliu, Postgraduate Researcher, Health and Medical Sciences, University of Surrey

    Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock

    Breast cancer is the most common cancer diagnosed in women globally. But, in part thanks to screening programmes, over 75% of those diagnosed with breast cancer in England now survive for ten years or more.

    However, due to a complex combination of racial disparities in the quality of healthcare patients receive, social factors such as poverty, and differences in tumour biology, Black women in the UK are more likely to die from the disease than women from other ethnicities.

    Breast screening improves breast cancer survival by identifying cancer at an earlier stage when it is easier to treat. In the UK, breast screening by mammography is offered free to women who are between the ages of 50 and 71 through the National Health Service Breast Screening Programme.

    Research shows that Black women in the UK are less likely to take part in breast screening programmes but are more likely to die from the disease from late diagnosis. So, why are Black women less likely to attend breast screenings when it could help save their lives?

    I was part of a team that reviewed all the studies which examined the barriers to breast cancer screening which Black women in the UK experience.

    The review found significant gaps in existing research on breast cancer in the Black community and barriers preventing Black African and Black Caribbean women in the UK in partaking in potentially life-saving breast cancer screenings. We reviewed nearly 1,000 papers, but only eight articles included Black women.

    The review found that previous research often grouped Black women from diverse backgrounds together, including Black African and Black Caribbean, masking important cultural nuances and different experiences. Additionally, the limited research available primarily focused on women who either attend screenings or who are ineligible, overlooking the crucial perspectives of those who are eligible but do not participate.

    As part of our research, we also wanted to identify any effective interventions to improve screening uptake for Black women – but we found no interventions that exclusively targeted Black women.

    Our study found that barriers were physical, emotional, cultural and related to healthcare. Black women who believed breast cancer could be treated if caught early were more likely to attend screening. Some of the key barriers, though, seem applicable to women from all ethnic groups. For example, fear of positive diagnosis.

    Cancer diagnosis is often seen as a death sentence but we found that Black women, in particular, are less likely to discuss breast cancer. Our review found that fear, stigma and negative perceptions of cancer contributed to a strong culture of silence which hindered responses to screening.

    Our review also found that many Black women who participated in the studies placed a high value on family relationships. Some Black African women, for example, were worried that if they were diagnosed and treated for breast cancer their partner might leave them or that their marriage prospects could be negatively affected because potential partners might think that cancer runs in their family.

    Barriers from healthcare structure were also flagged. Black women reported difficulties in attending screening appointments during work hours and lack of evening or weekend appointments prevented some women in full-time employment from attending screening.

    The review found that knowledge and awareness of breast cancer could be low, especially among some women born outside the UK, some of whom believed they weren’t vulnerable to breast cancer because they weren’t familiar with it in their country of birth. This shows a need for more culturally sensitive research on breast cancer screening in the Black communities.

    To reduce health disparities, then, and to enhance awareness of breast cancer screening, we recommend tailored community health programs and outreach initiatives that resonate with the people they are targeting.

    Anietie Aliu is affiliated with University of Surrey

    Aliu, A.E., Kerrison, R.S. and Marcu, A. (2025), A Systematic Review of Barriers to Breast Cancer Screening, and of Interventions Designed to Increase Participation, Among Women of Black African and Black Caribbean Descent in the UK. Psycho-Oncology, 34: e70093. https://doi-org.surrey.idm.oclc.org/10.1002/pon.70093

    – ref. Black women are more likely to die from breast cancer – so why is breast screening attendance still a problem? – https://theconversation.com/black-women-are-more-likely-to-die-from-breast-cancer-so-why-is-breast-screening-attendance-still-a-problem-250324

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: How our bodies react when we use social media – and when we stop

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Niklas Ihssen, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, Durham University

    shutterstock rawpixel.com/Shutterstock

    The typical adult in the UK spends nearly two hours on social media per day. And for younger users, this can easily be up to five hours. The likes of Instagram or TikTok seem to draw us into their ever-changing feeds and it’s difficult to tear ourselves away from these platforms.

    Now our latest study shows that even our body reflects a state of being glued to the screen when we are on social media.

    We asked 54 young adults to browse their Instagram on their phone for 15 minutes as they would normally do in their daily life. However, in our study we had attached electrodes to their chest and fingers that allowed us to record their heart rate and “skin conductance”, which is an indicator of sweating. Psychologists can use these physiological markers to infer subtle mental states and emotions. We also added a control condition where our participants read a news article on their phone, just before they logged onto Instagram.

    What we found was that, relative to the news reading condition, scrolling away on Instagram led to a marked slowing of participants’ heart rate while, at the same time, increasing their sweating response.

    From other research we know that such a pattern of bodily responses shows that someone’s attention is fully absorbed by a highly significant or emotional stimulus in their environment – it’s a state of simultaneous excitement and deep immersion into something very meaningful to us.

    Importantly, from the control condition we knew that it was not just being on the phone or reading that caused this bodily response. So there seems to be something special about social media that can easily engross us.

    The most intriguing effect in our study happened when we interrupted participants at the end of their Instagram stint and asked them to go back to reading another news article. Rather than snapping out of the excitement and returning to a calmer state, participants’ sweating response increased further, while heart rate also increased rather than slowed down further.

    Is it addiction?

    What was going on? What helped us interpret these effects were participants’ ratings of their emotions. We collected these before their social media bout and at the time we asked them to log off.

    Participants reported being stressed and anxious when they had to disconnect from their feed. They even reported having social media cravings at that moment. So it looked like the physiological response that we observed when participants had to log off reflected another form of arousal – but this time it was more negative and stress-related.

    Such bodily and psychological stress responses also occur when people with a substance addiction go through withdrawal during abstinence or after quitting “cold turkey”. So were these signs that we observed “withdrawal” from Instagram?

    The answer to this question is not straightforward. However, our study may give us some clues. After the experiment, we asked all participants to fill in a questionnaire assessing symptoms of “social media addiction”.

    While this concept is controversial and currently not recognised as a mental health disorder, the questionnaire told us something about how social media use can negatively affect someone’s daily life. This can even include their work or school results, or lead to conflict with their partners.

    Notably, we did not see any heart rate and sweating differences between participants who scored high or low on these addiction measures. That means, that all our participants showed a pattern of excited immersion during use and stress-related arousal when use was interrupted.

    We don’t think that this finding means that we are all addicted to social media though. Instead, we believe that social media offers very powerful rewards. And some of its features may indeed have an addictive dimension, such as the personalised short-video streams that trap us in an endless loop of entertaining content.

    Critically however, our previous study shows that it is primarily the social aspect of social media that drives most people to use it so intensively. This also means that – in contrast to drugs – social media taps into basic human needs: we all want to belong and to be liked.

    So if we recognise the existence of “social media addiction”, we might also need to recognise a “friendship addiction”. We should therefore exert caution with the term addiction in the context of social media – the risk is that normal behaviour could become “pathologised” and lead to stigma.

    And, as our previous research indicates, we may be just fine abstaining or cutting down from social media for a while without experiencing dramatic changes to our wellbeing (either positive or negative). The reason for this is that in contrast to drugs, we can satisfy our needs through other means – for instance, by talking to people.

    Niklas Ihssen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. How our bodies react when we use social media – and when we stop – https://theconversation.com/how-our-bodies-react-when-we-use-social-media-and-when-we-stop-251291

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: UK arts sector is getting a £270 million funding boost – but there are winners and losers

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Adam Behr, Senior Lecturer in Popular and Contemporary Music, Newcastle University

    “In any civilised community the arts … serious or comic, light or demanding, must occupy a central place. Their enjoyment should not be regarded as something remote from everyday life.” This was a central statement in the white paper (a statement of policy intent) issued 60 years ago by Jennie Lee, the UK’s first minister for the arts under Labour prime minister Harold Wilson in 1965.

    Outlining A Policy for the Arts – The First Steps was the first white paper for the arts (and the only one until 2016), and suggested that the arts should be publicly supported, also arguing for increased local and regional support besides national institutions.

    Many of Lee’s assertions still ring true today, not least that, “Today’s artists need more financial help, particularly in the early years before they have become established”. There were echoes of that 1965 statement of support for the arts in Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy’s recent announcement of a £270 million funding package. Indeed, the timing was no accident, Nandy explicitly referenced Lee’s “vision for accessibility in the arts”.

    This article is part of our State of the Arts series. These articles tackle the challenges of the arts and heritage industry – and celebrate the wins, too.

    It’s a broadly welcome intervention for a sector in straitened circumstances. A drop of more than 30% investment through local authorities in England since 2010, and of 21%, overall has left organisations struggling to maintain infrastructure, creating a drag on new developments. So an injection of government support for public assets like museums and libraries is a necessary step to stem the decline.

    Much, though, has changed since 1965. Absent from Lee’s communitarian account of governmental support for the arts is the language of economic return. The intervening decades have seen a sea change in the logics of arts funding.

    While the stated benefits of arts to society – and particularly education – remain salient, the emphasis has shifted over time from support to “investment”, with the arts and culture increasingly recognised and valued for, as Nandy puts it, “their growth potential to drive our economy forward”.

    This rhetorical and practical co-mingling of “culture” with the “creative industries” is a longitudinal shift. In political terms this was made clear by the 1997 rebranding of the Department for National Heritage (the first “culture” department, founded by Conservative prime minister John Major in 1992) as the Department for Media, Culture and Sport (DCMS) the last time Labour returned from a long spell in opposition.

    This defence of arts funding in “instrumental” terms (its economic return, or value in bumping up educational achievements) is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, there’s a risk of losing sight of culture’s intrinsic value as something worthy of support – art for art’s sake.

    At the same time, it has been accompanied by a move away from the more patrician conception of what merited state support. National institutions and the “high arts” were the main focus in the birth of the arts councils as part of the major overhaul of the role of the state – the postwar consensus – after the second world war.

    This points towards wider tensions in arts funding and the DCMS portfolio that derive from the evolving landscape since 1965. There was a strong emphasis in Lee’s paper, and in Nandy’s recent announcement, on buildings, infrastructure and established spaces. Vital as these are, the idea of what counts as culture has moved on and expanded since then.

    Even beyond their economic potential, the cultural value of practices more traditionally associated with commercial activity has become more central to the national conversation.

    Arts education has also become strategically important in both economic terms and in supporting widening access to opportunities across society, requiring a broad conception of “the arts”. The barriers between high art and popular culture have become porous, and this has a bearing on state support, especially when cultural activity overall is reeling from a pandemic and years of austerity.

    This is at the heart of those sectors left out of the current largesse. Drawing on both economic and cultural arguments Michael Kill, chief executive of the Night Time Industries Association, has noted the absence in Nandy’s proposal of live music venues, nightclubs and festivals.

    “The government has placed traditional and heritage culture at the forefront while completely ignoring the vital creative spaces that fuel innovation, inspire younger generations, and contribute significantly to our economy,” he wrote recently.

    DCMS funding is also a microcosm of any government spending in that it also comes with questions around opportunity cost (as the recent announcement about boosting the defence budget and immediate ramifications for foreign aid also make clear). Here too, the grassroots are a factor.

    Mark Davyd of the Music Venue Trust, for instance, has pointed out that his suggested “£20m to open 40 new grassroots music venues” was derided, but that there’s “£15m to build yet another hall for the National Railway Museum and £5m to build a poetry centre, and nobody thinks that £20m is funny.”

    Also rising rapidly up the agenda are concerns about the longer term impact of AI on creative careers, another area in which the DCMS – and the Department of Science Innovation and Technology – might see their plans for growth at odds with those in the creative industries and organisations.

    Artists are objecting to a suggested exception to copyright restrictions that would require them to actively “opt out” of their work being used to train AI models, and which benefit AI companies with the presumption that works can be used for that purpose.

    None of this is easy, especially after a long period of austerity in the arts, and a context of global uncertainty. But Nandy’s recent announcement of funding can only be seen as a holding action to halt the deterioration.

    To realise Jennie Lee’s vision, a more substantive, structural approach is needed, one that brings those activities at the grassroots, and at the margins of traditional views of “culture” under the umbrella of funding.

    Adam Behr has received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the British Academy.

    – ref. UK arts sector is getting a £270 million funding boost – but there are winners and losers – https://theconversation.com/uk-arts-sector-is-getting-a-270-million-funding-boost-but-there-are-winners-and-losers-251340

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Russia: Congratulations to Svetlana Yankelevich on her new appointment!

    Translartion. Region: Russians Fedetion –

    Source: State University of Management – Official website of the State –

    Svetlana Yankelevich, a graduate of the Academic Reserve educational program, has been appointed acting rector of the Siberian State University of Geosystems and Technologies (SSUGT).

    The educational program for training the personnel management reserve in the field of science and education “Academic Reserve” is implemented by the State University of Management by order of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation. Svetlana Yankelevich graduated from the program in 2023.

    In 1995, Svetlana Yankelevich graduated from the Siberian State Geodetic Academy (since 2014 – SSUGiT) with a degree in Cartography. In 1998, she completed her postgraduate studies at the same university. Associate Professor, Candidate of Technical Sciences. Author of 101 scientific articles, 4 educational publications and 1 collective monograph.

    Svetlana Yankelevich has dedicated her entire career to her native university. She started her career as an assistant, then became a senior lecturer, head of the department of cartography and geoinformatics at SSUGIT. Since 2017 – Vice-Rector for Academic and Educational Work at SSUGIT. Since 2022 – Vice-Rector for Academic and Educational Work and Youth Policy. Since 2025 – Acting Rector of SSUGIT.

    Awarded the Certificate of Honor and the medal of the Ministry of Education and Science of Russia “For contribution to the implementation of state policy in the field of education”.

    Congratulations to Svetlana Sergeevna on her new appointment! It is gratifying to see how graduates of the GUU family are climbing the career ladder. We are confident that the knowledge and connections gained will contribute to the successful completion of work tasks and the further development of USTUGIT!

    Subscribe to the TG channel “Our GUU” Date of publication: 03/04/2025

    Please note: This information is raw content directly from the source of the information. It is exactly what the source states and does not reflect the position of MIL-OSI or its clients.

    MIL OSI Russia News –

  • MIL-OSI USA: Governor Kehoe Announces Three Appointments to Various Boards, Fills Two County Office Vacancies 

    Source: US State of Missouri

    MARCH 4, 2025

    Jefferson City — Today, Governor Mike Kehoe announced three appointments to various boards and filled two county office vacancies.

    Scott Albers, of Country Club, was appointed to the Missouri Western State University Board of Governors.

    Mr. Albers is the president of Public Refrigerated Warehousing at Nor-Am Cold Storage and has served in leadership roles at the company since 2009. Active in the community, he serves on the board of the Global Cold Chain Alliance and previously held roles with the Greater St. Joseph United Way and the St. Joseph Chamber of Commerce. Albers earned a Bachelor of Arts in Finance from the University of Northern Iowa and a Master of Business Administration from the UCLA Anderson School of Business.

    Kathy Lambertz, of Harrisonville, was appointed as the Cass County Clerk.

    Ms. Lambertz currently serves as the chief deputy clerk in the Cass County Clerk’s Office, a position she has held since 2019. She previously served as Cass County clerk from 1999 to 2012 and worked as a senior appraiser in the assessor’s office from 2012 to 2019. With more than 30 years of experience in county government, she is also active in civic organizations, serving on the University of Missouri Extension Board and as an active member of the Harrisonville Kiwanis Club.

    William “Blaine” Luetkemeyer, of St. Elizabeth, was appointed to the University of Missouri Board of Curators.

    A retired U.S. Congressman, Mr. Luetkemeyer represented Missouri’s 3rd Congressional District from 2013 to 2025 and the 9th Congressional District from 2009 to 2013. During his tenure in Congress, he played a key role on the House Financial Services Committee, chaired multiple subcommittees, and helped secure $20 million for the NextGen MU Research Reactor at the University of Missouri. Before serving in Congress, Luetkemeyer was a Missouri State Representative, and as the Director of the Missouri Division of Tourism. Mr. Luetkemeyer has decades of experience as a small businessman, having worked as a community banker and bank examiner. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science with a minor in Business Administration from Lincoln University. In recognition of his contributions to higher education, Mr. Luetkemeyer received the Henry S. Geyer Award from the Mizzou Alumni Association in 2023.

    Todd Michalski, of St. Joseph, was appointed to the Missouri Western State University Board of Governors.

    Mr. Michalski is the senior vice president of sales and marketing at Gray Manufacturing Company, Inc. He serves as a board member for the Missouri Western State University Foundation and the Automotive Lift Institute. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration and minor in Marketing and Management from Missouri Western State University.

    Dave Schatz, of Sullivan, was appointed as the Franklin County Presiding Commissioner.

    Mr. Schatz is the vice president of Schatz Underground and the former president of Schatz Construction. He previously served as Missouri Senate President Pro Tem and was a State Senator from 2015 to 2022 and a State Representative from 2011 to 2014. A longtime business owner and community leader, Schatz remains active in local government, education initiatives, and community service throughout Franklin County.

    ###

    MIL OSI USA News –

  • MIL-OSI USA: Senators Markey and Cassidy Reintroduce Children and Teen’s Online Privacy Protection Legislation

    US Senate News:

    Source: United States Senator for Massachusetts Ed Markey
    Bill Text (PDF)
    Washington (March 4, 2025) – Senators Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), a member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, and Bill Cassidy (R-La.) today reintroduced the bipartisan Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA 2.0), which would update online data privacy rules for the 21st century and ensure children and teenagers are protected online. Senator Markey first introduced this legislation to update his original COPPA law in 2011 as a member of the House of Representatives and has introduced the bipartisan legislation in every Congress since.
    “We need strong modern legislation that keeps pace with the ever-evolving digital landscape and creates a safer online environment by addressing the youth mental health crisis and protecting the personal information of our kids,” said Senator Markey. “Congress must finally pass my Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act to extend these protections to teenagers, block targeted advertising to kids and teens, and give parents of young people an eraser button to protect them from predatory data collection practices.”
    “Every kid has an iPad or smartphone. They’re going to use the internet. Parents should be confident they can do it safely,” said Dr. Cassidy. “COPPA 2.0 is the tool that will give parents the peace of mind they need and keep their children’s personal information secure.”
    The legislation is also cosponsored by Senate Commerce Committee Ranking Member Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Senators Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), Shelly-Moore Capito (R-W.V.), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Ben Ray Lujan (D-N.M.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), Peter Welch (D-Vt.), Angus King (I-Maine), Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), Katie Britt (R-Ala.) and Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.).
    Specifically, the Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act would:
    Ban targeted advertising to children and teens;
    Create an “Eraser Button” by requiring companies to permit users to delete personal information collected from a child or teen;
    Establish data minimization rules to prohibit the excessive collection of children and teens’ data;
    Revise COPPA’s “actual knowledge” standard to close the loophole that allows platforms to ignore kids and teens on their site; and
    Build on COPPA by prohibiting internet companies from collecting personal information from users who are 13 to 16 years old without their consent.
    The legislation is endorsed by AASA – the School Superintendents Association, ACCESS Lab – Washington University in St. Louis, Alaska Eating Disorders Alliance, American Academy of Pediatrics, American Association for Psychoanalysis in Clinical Social Work, American Federation of Teachers, American Psychological Association, Association of Educational Service Agencies, Bilateral Safety Corridor Coalition, Carolina Resource Center for Eating Disorders, Center for Change, Center for Digital Democracy, Center for Humane Technology, Centerstone, CHILD USA, Children’s Justice Fund, Common Sense Media, Consumer Action, Consumer Federation of America, Consumer Watchdog, Defending the Early Years, Design It For Us, Early Childhood Work Group, Screen Time Action Network, Eating Disorder Foundation, Eating Disorders Coalition, Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), Fairplay, Farrington Specialty Centers, Foolproof, IFEDD – The International Federation of Eating Disorder Dietitians, Inseparable, International Society for Psychiatric Mental Health Nurses, Issue One, Lines for Life, Marsh Law Firm PPLC, Mentari, MO Eating Disorders Council, Multi-Service Eating Disorders Association, Inc. (MEDA), National Association for Pupil Transportation, National Association of School Nurses, National Federation of Families, National Parent Teacher Association (PTA), National Rural Education Association, Network for Public Education, P.E.A.C.E (Peace Educators Allied for Children Everywhere), Parents Who Fight, Phone Free Schools Movement, Public Interest Privacy Center (PIPC), Postpartum Support International, Prosperity Eating Disorders and Wellness, Psychotherapy Action Network (PsiAN), Public Citizen, PEDC, REGO Payment Architectures, Sandy Hook Promise, Strategic Training Initiative for the Prevention of Eating Disorders, Student Data Privacy Project, University of Connecticut Rudd Center for Food Policy & Health, Western Youth Services, Yellowstone Human Trafficking Task Force, and Young People’s Alliance.
    “The Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act, reintroduced by Senators Markey and Cassidy and other Senate co-sponsors, is more urgent than ever. Children’s surveillance has only intensified across social media, gaming, and virtual spaces, where companies harvest data to track, profile, and manipulate young users. COPPA 2.0 will ban targeted ads to those under 16, curbing the exploitation, manipulation, and discrimination of children for profit. By extending protections to teens and requiring a simple ‘eraser button’ to delete personal data, this legislation takes a critical step in restoring privacy rights in an increasingly invasive digital world,” said Katharina Kopp, Deputy Director of the Center for Digital Democracy.
    “Common Sense Media believes Congress must update the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act to strengthen safeguards for young children and extend vital protections to teenagers. Common Sense applauds Senators Markey and Cassidy for their unwavering commitment to this critical cause. With strong bi-partisan support having carried this legislation through the Senate last year, we are optimistic about securing passage in both chambers this year – America’s families deserve no less. This bill would take decisive action by prohibiting targeted advertising to young users, requiring platforms to acknowledge and protect children on their sites, and prevent companies from exploiting youth vulnerabilities for profit. This time has come for Congress to finally pass this essential legislation,” said James P. Steyer, Founder and CEO of Common Sense Media. 
    “The Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act is an essential step toward addressing youth mental health and online safety. By expanding critical privacy protections to teens for the first time, banning targeted advertising, and closing loopholes that allow platforms to ignore the presence of underage users, COPPA 2.0 will disrupt the business model that capitalizes on our kids’ attention at the expense of their physical and mental wellbeing. Last year, the Senate demonstrated the importance of this landmark legislation by passing it in a historic 91-3 vote. We applaud Senators Markey and Cassidy for reintroducing it so that Congress can finish the job and pass privacy protections for all youth in the 119th Congress,” said Haley Hinkle, Policy Counsel at Fairplay.
    “National PTA is committed to making sure that safeguards are in place to ensure the safety and well-being of children and youth online,” said Yvonne Johnson, President of the National Parent Teacher Association, the nation’s oldest and largest child advocacy association. “That’s why we’ve strongly advocated for COPPA 2.0, which would provide a long-overdue and desperately needed update of federal law to better protect the personal information of children online and ban targeted advertising toward children and teens. Our association applauds Senators Markey and Cassidy for reintroducing this critical legislation.”  
    “Design It For Us strongly supports Senators Markey and Cassidy reintroducing COPPA 2.0 to better protect the privacy of young people online. As a coalition of young advocates, we are all too familiar with Big Tech’s toxic business model that collects massive amounts of data on young people and uses it to target them with ads and content. Young people deserve the critical protections COPPA 2.0 has to offer, including privacy tools and an eraser button to delete personal information,” said Zamaan Qureshi, Co-Chair of Design It For Us.
    “Social media companies generate astronomical profits off our nation’s young people by turning platforms into a playground for advertisers. They are literally selling access to our children with targeted ads designed to prey on kids’ vulnerabilities. A child as young as 13 struggling with an eating disorder will be targeted with a constant stream of deceptive ads for the next miracle diet pill. In what other setting would we ever allow that? Parents across the country are calling for common-sense age restrictions on targeted ads on social media. COPPA 2.0 is a much-needed answer to their call,” said Dr. S. Bryn Austin, Board Member at Eating Disorders Coalition and Director of the Strategic Training Initiative for the Prevention of Eating Disorders.
    “The Public Interest Privacy Center (PIPC) is proud to support the re-introduction of COPPA 2.0. COPPA 2.0 increases the age of individuals entitled to foundational privacy protections online from children under 13 to teens under 17. In today’s digital world, prioritizing the privacy and safety of children and teens online should no longer be optional. COPPA 2.0 will help to make this a reality,” said Amelia Vance, President of Public Interest Privacy Center.
    “AASA is proud to support the re-introduction of COPPA 2.0. This legislation is more important than ever, as it will fill the gap left by the Federal Trade Commission declining to codify long-standing guidance allowing schools to consent to edtech in their recent update to the COPPA Rule. COPPA 2.0 finds the right balance between increasing protections for children and teen privacy online while still allowing schools to provide appropriate, technology-enhanced educational opportunities for all students,” said Dr. David R. Schuler, Executive Director of AASA, The School Superintendents Association.
    “Public school educators and parents want kids to learn and thrive in safe, engaging and welcoming schools. However, Big Tech’s dismal failure to erect basic safeguards around its predatory social media products has resulted in a growing plague of loneliness, anxiety and depression. We must pass commonsense regulations and laws to protect children from these dangers, just as we did with lead paint and seatbelts, and as Congress almost did last year before Meta’s last minute opposition lobbying. Sen. Ed Markey’s bill, COPPA 2.0, would protect our kids by modernizing and strengthening privacy laws to reflect the online world they live in now. And it would stop Big Tech’s invasive data practices that track and traumatize kids for profit,” said Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).
    “For too long, Big Tech has evaded accountability by exploiting young users with manipulative design features and harvesting their data to fuel addictive algorithms. As long as these companies profit from hooking children and exploiting their sensitive data, they will continue to prioritize profits at-all-cost over democracy. The Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act 2.0 shifts this paradigm by introducing critical protections, including data minimization requirements, a ban on targeted advertising to children and teens, and the closure of loopholes that allow platforms to ignore young users on their sites. Congress now has a crucial opportunity to stand with millions of Americans — parents, young people, and advocates — demanding common-sense safeguards for kids online,” said Alix Fraser, Vice President of Technology Reform at Issue One.
    “In the absence of a strong federal comprehensive privacy law, it’s critical that we at least protect the most vulnerable people online — kids and teens. Senator Markey and Cassidy’s Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA 2.0) does this by placing critical limits on the amount of data that can be collected from young users online to what is necessary for the product or service requested by the child or teen. EPIC is proud to support COPPA 2.0,” said Caitriona Fitzgerald, Deputy Director at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).
    “The Young People’s Alliance supports Senator Markey and Senator Cassidy as they reintroduce COPPA 2.0, a critical step in curbing Big Tech’s exploitative revenue model. Data privacy cuts predatory platforms off at the source, limiting their ability to track, manipulate, and profit off kids. This, alongside banning targeted ads and allowing minors to delete their data will give young people more control over their online experiences, which we are extremely grateful to see,” said Ava Smithing, Advocacy Director at the Young People’s Alliance.
    “The Children and Teens’ Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA 2.0) is an important piece of legislation to protect young people from harmful and exploitative advertising online. We strongly support this bipartisan bill and applaud the legislators who are working to see that it passes. Kids are not just tiny adults – their young minds are incredibly vulnerable to the content they’re exposed to on social media. This can lead to terrible and tragic outcomes like violence, self-harm, and suicide. As trusted adults, we must do all we can to protect our youth from these kinds of dangerous marketing practices and online materials,” said Mark Barden, Co-Founder and CEO of the Sandy Hook Promise Action Fund and father of Daniel, who was killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting.
    In December 2024, Senator Markey blasted the decision not to include COPPA 2.0 in the continuing resolution to fund the government through March 14, 2025. In September 2024, the House Energy and Commerce Committee passed COPPA 2.0 by a voice vote. In July 2024, the U.S. Senate passed the Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act, which included COPPA 2.0, by a 91-3 vote. In July 2023, the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee unanimously passed COPPA 2.0.

    MIL OSI USA News –

  • MIL-OSI Security: Defense News: Military Sealift Command Completes Operation Deep Freeze 2025 Cargo Operations in Antarctic

    Source: United States Navy

    Military Sealift Command has completed its resupply mission in Antarctica with the departure of the MSC chartered ship MV Ocean Gladiator. The mission was in support of Operation Deep Freeze 2025, the Joint Task Force Support for Antarctica mission to the National Science Foundation-managed U.S. Antarctic Program.

    MIL Security OSI –

  • MIL-OSI Global: PKK leader’s call to disarm fuels hope for end to Kurdish conflict – but peace is not imminent

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Pinar Dinc, Associate Professor of Political Science, Department of Political Science & Researcher, Centre for Advanced Middle Eastern Studies, Lund University

    Abdullah Öcalan, the imprisoned leader of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK), has called on the group to disarm and dissolve itself. In a letter read out by his political allies in Istanbul, Turkey, on February 27, he wrote: “I take on the historical responsibility for this call … All groups must lay down their arms and the PKK must dissolve itself.”

    Two days later, the PKK’s executive committee declared a ceasefire to its armed struggle against the Turkish state. The conflict, which began in 1984 with the aim of establishing an independent Kurdish state in response to state oppression, has claimed the lives of more than 40,000 people and displaced hundreds of thousands more.

    Öcalan has been imprisoned on an island south of Istanbul since 1999, when he was captured by Turkish security forces in Kenya. But he has remained the leader of the PKK throughout and has kept his strong personality cult among the Kurdish freedom movement.

    He was the force behind the PKK’s shift away from its separatist goals in the 2000s. He argued that the solution to the Kurdish question in the Middle East was for greater autonomy and Kurdish rights through the idea of “democratic confederalism”, built on the pillars of direct democracy rather than a nation-state model.

    In his letter, Öcalan repeated this argument. He blamed the past 200 years of capitalist modernity for the break up of the alliance between the Kurds and the Turks. And he highlighted the importance of a truly democratic society and political space for a lasting solution to the Kurdish struggle.

    Öcalan’s letter mainly addressed the Turkish public and international community, and is likely to have been “approved” by the Turkish state. As such, it was rather short, at times vague, and did not propose a detailed framework about the peace process between Turkey and the PKK.

    But after Öcalan’s letter was read out, Sırrı Süreyya Önder, a member of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy party (DEM), shared with journalists an additional remark Öcalan had made.

    Öcalan had apparently said: “Undoubtedly, in practice, the laying down of arms and the dissolution of the PKK require the recognition of democratic politics and a legal framework”. This point suggests that Öcalan’s call to disarm is merely the beginning of a long process to bring the conflict to a close.

    The PKK has announced that, in order for disarmament and dissolution to be put into practice, Öcalan needs to lead this congress personally. This indicates an expectation for Öcalan to gain some sort of freedom to communicate and direct the process.

    Support for dissolution

    Leading figures from several pro-Kurdish groups have welcomed the order for the PKK to disarm. This has included Mazloum Abdi, the commander of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), and Salih Muslim, the former co-chairperson of the Democratic Union party (PYD) in Syria.

    Öcalan’s call has also received support from the international community. This includes the US and UK, which alongside many other nations, recognise the PKK as a terrorist organisation. On February 27, US National Security Council spokesperson Brian Hughes told CNN that the announcement was “a significant development” that “we believe will help bring peace to this troubled region”.

    Perhaps most importantly, Öcalan’s announcement has been welcomed almost unanimously by political parties in Turkey. Only the ultra-nationalist Good and Victory parties oppose the call to dissolve the PKK, seeing any negotiations with the group as compromising national integrity.

    But, despite this important step towards peace, it remains difficult to see an imminent end to the Kurdish struggle in Turkey. The Justice and Development party (AKP) and the Nationalist Movement party, which have ruled Turkey together since 2023, have been continuing their oppression of the democratic sphere.

    They have replaced elected Kurdish mayors with government officials, while also imprisoning democratically elected Kurdish politicians. And people in the media, civil society and other democratic movements, such as the People’s Democratic Congress, have been criminalised and detained.

    At the same time, Turkey considers the SDF and other Kurdish organisations like the People’s Protection Units (YPG) and the PYD as offshoots of the PKK. It has supported its militia force in Syria, the Syrian National Army, to stop the Kurdish autonomous region on its border from achieving political status, seeing it as a direct threat to national security.

    Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has warned the PKK of further action if the process of disarmament is stalled. In a post on X on March 1, Erdoğan wrote: “If the promises are not kept … such as delaying, deceiving, changing names … we will continue our operations, if necessary, until we eliminate the last terrorist”.

    This signals an expectation from the Turkish state that they want all of the groups they associate with the PKK, armed and non-armed, to also disband. However, Abdi has asserted that Öcalan’s call for the PKK to dissolve does not apply to the group he leads. “If there is peace in Turkey, that means there is no excuse to keep attacking us here in Syria”, Abdi said.

    The Syrian National Army has been launching attacks in northern Syria to capture territory from the SDF, with fighting particularly intense around the Tishreen Dam.

    The Turkey-backed SNA has been attacking SDF positions in northern Syria.
    Institute for the Study of War

    So far, the only positive approach from the Turkish government has been signalling a possible change in the constitutional definition of citizenship to go beyond ethnic criteria. This would be a first step towards a more pluralist and inclusive description of citizenship in Turkey, where people from several ethnic groups have lived for centuries.

    There are various concerns over the ways in which the dissolution process will be carried out. But the possibility of peace is valuable as it opens up democratic avenues for struggle. Resolving the Kurdish question, one of Turkey’s most pressing unresolved issues, will pave the way for progress in other areas such as democratisation and freedom of expression.

    Pinar Dinc is the principal investigator of the ECO-Syria project, which receives funding from the Strategic Research Area: The Middle East in the Contemporary World (MECW) at the Centre for Advanced Middle Eastern Studies, Lund University, Sweden.

    – ref. PKK leader’s call to disarm fuels hope for end to Kurdish conflict – but peace is not imminent – https://theconversation.com/pkk-leaders-call-to-disarm-fuels-hope-for-end-to-kurdish-conflict-but-peace-is-not-imminent-251281

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: How the risk of AI weapons could spiral out of control

    Source: The Conversation – UK – By Akhil Bhardwaj, Associate Professor (Strategy and Organisation), School of Management, University of Bath

    marina.rodrigues/Shutterstock

    Sometimes AI isn’t as clever as we think it is. Researchers training an algorithm to identify skin cancer thought they had succeeded until they discovered that it was using the presence of a ruler to help it make predictions. Specifically, their data set consisted of images where a pathologist had put in a ruler to measure the size of malignant lesions.

    It extended this logic for predicting malignancies to all images beyond the data set, consequently identifying benign tissue as malignant if a ruler was in the image.

    The problem here is not that the AI algorithm made a mistake. Rather, the concern stems from how the AI “thinks”. No human pathologist would arrive at this conclusion.

    These cases of flawed “reasoning” abound – from HR algorithms that prefer to hire men because the data set is skewed in their favour to propagating racial disparities in medical treatment. Now that they know about these problems, researchers are scrambling to address them.

    Recently, Google decided to end its longstanding ban on developing AI weapons. This potentially encompasses the use of AI to develop arms, as well as AI in surveillance and weapons that could be deployed autonomously on the battlefield. The decision came days after parent company Alphabet experienced a 6% drop in its share price.

    This is not Google’s first foray into murky waters. It worked with the US Department of Defense on the use of its AI technology for Project Maven, which involved object recognition for drones.

    When news of this contract became public in 2018, it sparked backlash from employees who did not want the technology they developed to be used in wars. Ultimately, Google did not renew its contract, which was picked up by rival Palantir instead.

    The speed with which Google’s contract was renewed by a competitor led some to note the inevitability of these developments, and that it was perhaps better to be on the inside to shape the future.

    Such arguments, of course, presume that firms and researchers will be able to shape the future as they want to. But previous research has shown that this assumption is flawed for at least three reasons.

    The confidence trap

    First, human beings are susceptible to falling into what is known as a “confidence trap”. I have researched this phenomenon, whereby people assume that since previous risk-taking paid off, taking more risks in the future is warranted.

    In the context of AI, this may mean incrementally extending the use of an algorithm beyond its training data set. For example, a driverless car may be used on a route has not been covered in its training.

    This can throw up problems. There is now an abundance of data that driverless car AI can draw on, and yet mistakes still occur. Accidents like the Tesla car that drove into a £2.75 million jet when summoned by its owner in an unfamiliar setting, can still happen. For AI weapons, there isn’t even much data to begin with.



    Read more:
    Is Tesla’s sales slump down to Elon Musk?

    Second, AI can reason in ways that are alien to human understanding. This has led to the paperclip thought experiment, where AI is asked to produce as many paper clips as possible. It does so while consuming all resources – including those necessary for human survival.

    Of course, this seems trivial. After all, humans can lay out ethical guidelines. But the problem lies in being unable to anticipate how an AI algorithm might achieve what humans have asked of it and thus losing control. This might even include “cheating.” In a recent experiment, AI cheated to win chess games by modifying system files denoting positions of chess pieces, in effect enabling it to make illegal moves.

    But society may be willing to accept mistakes, as with civilian casualties caused by drone strikes directed by humans. This tendency is something known as the “banality of extremes” – humans normalise even the more extreme instances of evil as a cognitive mechanism to cope. The “alienness” of AI reasoning may simply provide more cover for doing so.

    Third, firms like Google that are associated with developing these weapons might be too big to fail. As a consequence, even when there are clear instances of AI going wrong, they are unlikely to be held responsible. This lack of accountability creates a hazard as it disincentivises learning and corrective actions.

    The “cosying up” of tech executives with US president Donald Trump only exacerbates the problem as it further dilutes accountability.

    Tech moguls like Elon Musk cosying up to the US president dilutes accountability.
    Joshua Sukoff/Shutterstock

    Rather than joining the race towards the development of AI weaponry, an alternative approach would be to work on a comprehensive ban on it’s development and use.

    Although this might seem unachievable, consider the threat of the hole in the ozone layer. This brought rapid unified action in the form of banning the CFCs that caused it. In fact, it took only two years for governments to agree on a global ban on the chemicals. This stands as a testament to what can be achieved in the face of a clear, immediate and well-recognised threat.

    Unlike climate change – which despite overwhelming evidence continues to have detractors – recognition of the threat of AI weapons is nearly universal and includes leading technology entrepreneurs and scientists.

    In fact, banning the use and development of certain types of weapons has precedent – countries have after all done the same for biological weapons. The problem lies in no country wanting another to have it before they do, and no business wanting to lose out in the process.

    In this sense, choosing to weaponise AI or disallowing it will mirror the wishes of humanity. The hope is that the better side of human nature will prevail.

    Akhil Bhardwaj does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. How the risk of AI weapons could spiral out of control – https://theconversation.com/how-the-risk-of-ai-weapons-could-spiral-out-of-control-251167

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Russia: We invite teachers of the State University of Management to participate in the All-Russian competition “Golden Names of Higher Education”

    Translartion. Region: Russians Fedetion –

    Source: State University of Management – Official website of the State –

    Applications for participation in the All-Russian competition “Golden Names of Higher Education” are accepted from March 1 to May 31, 2025. We invite the teaching staff of the State University of Management to participate in the Competition.

    The Golden Names of Higher Education Competition has been held by the Interregional Public Organization League of Higher Education Teachers with the support of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation since 2017. It is aimed at identifying and supporting talented teachers and scientists who have made a significant contribution to the development of Russian higher education and science. Over the entire history of the Competition, more than 7 thousand teachers have taken part in it.

    This year, the Competition is held in 10 nominations, revealing various aspects of the teaching profession: educational, scientific, educational work, training of postgraduate students, project and international activities. In the nomination “For the implementation of innovative teaching methods” additional points are awarded to participants and winners of the International Film Festival of Educational Films and Innovative Educational Content “KinoIntellect”. There is also a special nomination for young teachers.

    Applications are accepted on the website https://goldennames.professorstoday.org/.

    The award ceremony for the competition winners will take place on Higher Education Teachers’ Day, November 19, 2025, at the National Center “Russia”.

    Let us recall that last year, the State University of Management organized the award ceremony, and the rector’s advisor Nikolai Mikhailov received the award in the nomination “For Contribution to Science and Higher Education.”

    All additional information about the Competition can be found in the attached information letter.

    Golden Names of Higher Education. Information Letter

    Subscribe to the tg channel “Our State University” Announcement date: 03/04/2025

    Please note: This information is raw content directly from the source of the information. It is exactly what the source states and does not reflect the position of MIL-OSI or its clients.

    MIL OSI Russia News –

  • MIL-OSI Asia-Pac: Choi Yuk-lin mourns Woo Chia-wei

    Source: Hong Kong Information Services

    Secretary for Education Choi Yuk-lin today expressed her deep sorrow over the passing of Hong Kong University of Science & Technology founding president Prof Woo Chia-wei, and extended her deepest condolences to his family.

    Prof Woo led the establishment of the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology and served as its president from 1991 to 2001.

    Ms Choi said: “During his tenure, Prof Woo laid a strong foundation for the development of this world-class institution and was dedicated to driving Hong Kong’s transformation into a knowledge-based economy through scientific research.

    “Prof Woo was also an outstanding community leader, contributing to various fields over the years. In addition to being highly respected in the higher education sector, he also made immense contributions to the development of Hong Kong.”

    His significant contributions to higher education will be remembered and cherished by the education sector, Ms Choi added.

    MIL OSI Asia Pacific News –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Tibet is one of the most linguistically diverse places in the world. This is in danger of extinction

    Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Gerald Roche, Lecturer in Linguistics, La Trobe University

    Three days after he was released from prison in December, a Tibetan village leader named Gonpo Namgyal died. As his body was being prepared for traditional Tibetan funeral rites, marks were found indicating he had been brutally tortured in jail.

    His crime? Gonpo Namgyal had been part of a campaign to protect the Tibetan language in China.

    Gonpo Namgyal is the victim of a slow-moving conflict that has dragged on for nearly 75 years, since China invaded Tibet in the mid-20th century. Language has been central to that conflict.

    Tibetans have worked to protect the Tibetan language and resisted efforts to enforce Mandarin Chinese. Yet, Tibetan children are losing their language through enrolment in state boarding schools where they are being educated nearly exclusively in Mandarin Chinese. Tibetan is typically only taught a few times a week – not enough to sustain the language.

    My research, published in a new book in 2024, provides unique insights into the struggle of other minority languages in Tibet that receive far less attention.

    My research shows that language politics in Tibet are surprisingly complex and driven by subtle violence, perpetuated not only by Chinese authorities but also other Tibetans. I’ve also found that outsiders’ efforts to help are failing the minority languages at the highest risk of extinction.

    Tibetan culture under attack

    I lived in Ziling, the largest city on the Tibetan Plateau, from 2005 to 2013, teaching in a university, studying Tibetan and supporting local non-government organisations.

    Most of my research since then has focused on language politics in the Rebgong valley on the northeast Tibetan Plateau. From 2014 to 2018, I interviewed dozens of people, spoke informally with many others, and conducted hundreds of household surveys about language use.

    I also collected and analysed Tibetan language texts, including government policies, online essays, social media posts and even pop song lyrics.

    When I was in Ziling, Tibetans launched a massive protest movement against Chinese rule just before the Beijing Olympics in 2008. These protests led to harsh government crackdowns, including mass arrests, increased surveillance, and restrictions on freedom of movement and expressions of Tibetan identity. This was largely focused on language and religion.

    Years of unrest ensued, marked by more demonstrations and individual acts of sacrifice. Since 2009, more than 150 Tibetans have set themselves on fire to protest Chinese rule.

    Not just Tibetan under threat

    Tibet is a linguistically diverse place. In addition to Tibetan, about 60 other languages are spoken in the region. About 4% of Tibetans (around 250,000 people) speak a minority language.

    Government policy forces all Tibetans to learn and use Mandarin Chinese. Those who speak only Tibetan have a harder time finding work and are faced with discrimination and even violence from the dominant Han ethnic group.

    Meanwhile, support for Tibetan language education has slowly been whittled away: the government even recently banned students from having private Tibetan lessons or tutors on their school holidays.

    Linguistic minorities in Tibet all need to learn and use Mandarin. But many also need to learn Tibetan to communicate with other Tibetans: classmates, teachers, doctors, bureaucrats or bosses.

    In Rebgong, where I did my research, the locals speak a language they call Manegacha. Increasingly, this language is being replaced by Tibetan: about a third of all families that speak Manegacha are now teaching Tibetan to their children (who also must learn Mandarin).

    The government refuses to provide any opportunities to use and learn minority languages like Manegacha. It also tolerates constant discrimination and violence against Manegacha speakers by other Tibetans.

    These assimilationist state policies are causing linguistic diversity across Tibet to collapse. As these minority languages are lost, people’s mental and physical health suffers and their social connections and communal identities are destroyed.

    How do Manegacha communities resist and navigate language oppression?

    Why does this matter?

    Tibetan resistance to Chinese rule dates back to the People’s Liberation Army invasion in the early 1950s.

    When the Dalai Lama fled to India in 1959, that resistance movement went global. Governments around the world have continued to support Tibetan self-determination and combat Chinese misinformation about Tibet, such as the US Congress passage of the Resolve Tibet Act in 2024.

    Outside efforts to support the Tibetan struggle, however, are failing some of the most vulnerable people: those who speak minority languages.

    Manegacha speakers want to maintain their language. They resist the pressure to assimilate whenever they speak Manegacha to each other, post memes online in Manegacha or push back against the discrimination they face from other Tibetans.

    However, if Tibetans stop speaking Manegacha and other minority languages, this will contribute to the Chinese government’s efforts to erase Tibetan identity and culture.

    Even if the Tibetan language somehow survives in China, the loss of even one of Tibet’s minority languages would be a victory for the Communist Party in the conflict it started 75 years ago.

    Gerald Roche has received funding for this research from the Australian Research Council. He is also affiliated with the Linguistic Justice Foundation.

    – ref. Tibet is one of the most linguistically diverse places in the world. This is in danger of extinction – https://theconversation.com/tibet-is-one-of-the-most-linguistically-diverse-places-in-the-world-this-is-in-danger-of-extinction-246316

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Melting Antarctic ice will slow the world’s strongest ocean current – and the global consequences are profound

    Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Taimoor Sohail, Postdoctoral Researcher, School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, The University of Melbourne

    Mongkolchon Akesin, Shutterstock

    Flowing clockwise around Antarctica, the Antarctic Circumpolar Current is the strongest ocean current on the planet. It’s five times stronger than the Gulf Stream and more than 100 times stronger than the Amazon River.

    It forms part of the global ocean “conveyor belt” connecting the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian oceans. The system regulates Earth’s climate and pumps water, heat and nutrients around the globe.

    But fresh, cool water from melting Antarctic ice is diluting the salty water of the ocean, potentially disrupting the vital ocean current.

    Our new research suggests the Antarctic Circumpolar Current will be 20% slower by 2050 as the world warms, with far-reaching consequences for life on Earth.

    The Antarctic Circumpolar Current keeps Antarctica isolated from the rest of the global ocean, and connects the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans.
    Sohail, T., et al (2025), Environmental Research Letters., CC BY

    Why should we care?

    The Antarctic Circumpolar Current is like a moat around the icy continent.

    The current helps to keep warm water at bay, protecting vulnerable ice sheets. It also acts as a barrier to invasive species such as southern bull kelp and any animals hitching a ride on these rafts, spreading them out as they drift towards the continent. It also plays a big part in regulating Earth’s climate.

    Unlike better known ocean currents – such as the Gulf Stream along the United States East Coast, the Kuroshio Current near Japan, and the Agulhas Current off the coast of South Africa – the Antarctic Circumpolar Current is not as well understood. This is partly due to its remote location, which makes obtaining direct measurements especially difficult.

    Understanding the influence of climate change

    Ocean currents respond to changes in temperature, salt levels, wind patterns and sea-ice extent. So the global ocean conveyor belt is vulnerable to climate change on multiple fronts.

    Previous research suggested one vital part of this conveyor belt could be headed for a catastrophic collapse.

    Theoretically, warming water around Antarctica should speed up the current. This is because density changes and winds around Antarctica dictate the strength of the current. Warm water is less dense (or heavy) and this should be enough to speed up the current. But observations to date indicate the strength of the current has remained relatively stable over recent decades.

    This stability persists despite melting of surrounding ice, a phenomenon that had not been fully explored in scientific discussions in the past.

    What we did

    Advances in ocean modelling allow a more thorough investigation of the potential future changes.

    We used Australia’s fastest supercomputer and climate simulator in Canberra to study the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. The underlying model, ACCESS-OM2-01, has been developed by Australian researchers from various universities as part of the Consortium for Ocean-Sea Ice Modelling in Australia.

    The model captures features others often miss, such as eddies. So it’s a far more accurate way to assess how the current’s strength and behaviour will change as the world warms. It picks up the intricate interactions between ice melting and ocean circulation.

    In this future projection, cold, fresh melt water from Antarctica migrates north, filling the deep ocean as it goes. This causes major changes to the density structure of the ocean. It counteracts the influence of ocean warming, leading to an overall slowdown in the current of as much as 20% by 2050.

    Far-reaching consequences

    The consequences of a weaker Antarctic Circumpolar Current are profound and far-reaching.

    As the main current that circulates nutrient-rich waters around Antarctica, it plays a crucial role in the Antarctic ecosystem.

    Weakening of the current could reduce biodiversity and decrease the productivity of fisheries that many coastal communities rely on. It could also aid the entry of invasive species such as southern bull kelp to Antarctica, disrupting local ecosystems and food webs.

    A weaker current may also allow more warm water to penetrate southwards, exacerbating the melting of Antarctic ice shelves and contributing to global sea-level rise. Faster ice melting could then lead to further weakening of the current, commencing a vicious spiral of current slowdown.

    This disruption could extend to global climate patterns, reducing the ocean’s ability to regulate climate change by absorbing excess heat and carbon in the atmosphere.

    Ocean currents around the world (NASA)

    Need to reduce emissions

    While our findings present a bleak prognosis for the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, the future is not predetermined. Concerted efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions could still limit melting around Antarctica.

    Establishing long-term studies in the Southern Ocean will be crucial for monitoring these changes accurately.

    With proactive and coordinated international actions, we have a chance to address and potentially avert the effects of climate change on our oceans.

    The authors thank Polar Climate Senior Researcher Dr Andreas Klocker, from the NORCE Norwegian Research Centre and Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research, for his contribution to this research, and Professor Matthew England from the University of New South Wales, who provided the outputs from the model simulation for this analysis.

    Taimoor Sohail receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

    Bishakhdatta Gayen receives funding from Australian Research Council (ARC). He works at University of Melbourne as ARC Future Fellow and Associate Professor. He is also A/Prof. at CAOS, Indian Institute of Science.

    – ref. Melting Antarctic ice will slow the world’s strongest ocean current – and the global consequences are profound – https://theconversation.com/melting-antarctic-ice-will-slow-the-worlds-strongest-ocean-current-and-the-global-consequences-are-profound-251053

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI Global: Another US funding cut threatens human rights in North Korea – and hands more power to a dictator

    Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Danielle Chubb, Associate Professor of International Relations, Deakin University

    Shutterstock

    This week, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights in North Korea issued an appeal to the international community. She expressed concern about the future of civil society work on North Korean human rights.

    The cause for alarm is a sudden freeze on the funds of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)- a US nongovernmental organisation.

    One major beneficiary of funds from the NED are groups documenting and helping to stop human rights abuses in North Korea.

    The funding halt threatens to damage further the lives of people living under one of the world’s most egregious authoritarian regimes.

    What is the NED?

    The NED is a US institution with a long history in its foreign policy, described as a “bastion of Republican internationalism”. Established by an act of Congress, it was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan in 1983.

    With bipartisan support, the NED is squarely based on core Republican values of spreading democracy through the world. It supports the work of nongovernmental organisations in more than 100 countries every year.

    While it is unclear why Elon Musk, in his role in the Department of Government Efficiency, has suddenly taken aim at this institution, the consequences of cutting off funding overnight are easy to see.

    One result is the likely end of decades-long work on North Korean human rights.

    How this affects North Korea

    One of the groups hit hard by this funding freeze is the Citizens’ Alliance for North Korean Human Rights. The original single-issue North Korean human rights organisation, it’s now planning to shut its doors.

    Without NED funding, it says it cannot cover its running costs, such as paying the rent or staff salaries.

    It also can’t continue its important work investigating and documenting human rights abuses suffered by North Korean people.

    The Citizens’ Alliance is just one of many groups, most of which are based in South Korea, that rely on the NED for their work.

    The political environment in South Korea is uncertain and precarious for North Korean human rights activists. Despite efforts to diversify funding sources over many decades, there are few other options.

    I have studied this question in-depth and over two decades. It’s a problem that cannot be overcome overnight, or even in the medium term, as it’s so deeply embedded, both politically and socially.

    In the absence of funding opportunities in South Korea, Seoul-based groups must look abroad.

    Yet many of the international support schemes available exist to fund in-country democratisation and human rights efforts.

    The authoritarian regime in North Korea is so complete that no active, open civil society efforts can safely take place. The movement relies entirely on transnational activism and so doesn’t neatly fit into existing funding schemes.

    On top of this, the funding freeze comes at a particularly bad time, with South Korea in a state of political turmoil. In the wake of the President Yoon Suk-yeol’s impeachment following his declaration of martial law, it is unclear what the future of the limited number of existing initiatives will be.

    Putting North Korea in the spotlight

    For a long time, the plight of those suffering human rights abuses inside the secretive country was not well known to the outside world.

    For decades, civil society groups built coalitions, gathered information, wrote reports, compiled databases, held public awareness-raising events, and lobbied politicians at all different levels. They then succeeded in bringing about the 2014 UN Commission of Inquiry into North Korean Human Rights.

    This inquiry, chaired by Australia’s Michael Kirby, has been the definitive document on North Korean human rights for more than ten years.

    Its findings of gross violations of human rights inside the country have formed the evidentiary basis for international action on North Korean human rights. Examples of the report’s findings include:

    • the use of political prison camps, torture, executions and other sorts of arbitrary detention to suppress real or perceived political dissent

    • an almost complete denial of the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion and association

    • the use of access to food as a means of control over the population.

    Non-profit North Korean human rights groups remain at the centre of this work. Having succeeded in putting the issue squarely on the international agenda, they continue to press for greater attention on the human rights situation from the international community.

    The groups relying on NED funding do a wide range of work. They support North Koreans living in South Korea and elsewhere abroad. Some provide support to formally record human rights abuses, helping build a robust database of testimony from survivors.

    Others back in-country accounts from underground North Korean journalists, and more still do myriad other advocacy, support and accountability work.

    But now this work could all end more suddenly than anyone could have expected.

    More power to a dictator

    The Database Center for North Korean Human Rights has paused all but its most urgent programs and launched an appeal for donations. Executive Director Hannah Song has described the situation as a crisis of “a massive and sudden cut to funding that threatens the crucial work of those on the frontlines”.

    Sokeel Park, the leader of another nongovernmental group working in this space, described it as “by far the biggest crisis facing NGOs working on this issue since the start of the movement in the 1990s”.

    This is no exaggeration. The North Korean human rights movement has had an outsized effect on the international community’s awareness and understanding of how the North Korean government maintains order and represses dissent.

    So who wins out of this? North Korea’s Supreme Leader and dictator, Kim Jong-un.

    Back in 2018, US President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address centred on the human rights violations suffered by the North Korean people at the hands of the authoritarian regime. Trump declared:

    we need only look at the depraved character of the North Korean regime to understand the nature of the nuclear threat it could pose.

    Now, by effectively silencing the government’s most vocal critics, the Trump administration appears to be giving breathing room to one of the world’s most atrocious authoritarian regimes.

    Danielle Chubb does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

    – ref. Another US funding cut threatens human rights in North Korea – and hands more power to a dictator – https://theconversation.com/another-us-funding-cut-threatens-human-rights-in-north-korea-and-hands-more-power-to-a-dictator-251239

    MIL OSI – Global Reports –

  • MIL-OSI: Spartan Capital Securities, LLC Serves as Co-Placement Agent in Healthcare Triangle, Inc.’s $15.2 Million Private Placement

    Source: GlobeNewswire (MIL-OSI)

    New York, NY, March 04, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Spartan Capital Securities, LLC, a premier investment banking firm, is pleased to announce the successful completion of a $15.2 million private placement for Healthcare Triangle, Inc. (Nasdaq: HCTI). Spartan Capital Securities, LLC acted as Co-Placement Agent in this private offering, supporting Healthcare Triangle’s continued expansion and digital transformation initiatives in the healthcare and life sciences industries.

    The proceeds from this offering will fund strategic acquisitions, general corporate purposes, and working capital needs, further advancing Healthcare Triangle’s mission to deliver cutting-edge cloud enablement, cybersecurity, and data analytics solutions.

    Spartan Capital Securities played a pivotal role in placing $14,200,000 of the private placement, reinforcing its strong position in the investment banking sector.

    “We are honored to serve as Co-Placement Agent in this private placement for Healthcare Triangle,” said John Lowry, CEO of Spartan Capital Securities. “Healthcare Triangle is at the forefront of digital innovation in healthcare and life sciences, and this successful transaction reflects both the strength of their vision and Spartan Capital’s dedication to facilitating meaningful investment opportunities. We look forward to supporting Healthcare Triangle’s continued growth and success.”

    RBW Capital Partners LLC (a division of Dawson James Securities, Inc.) and Spartan Capital Securities, LLC served as Co-Placement Agents for the offering. Sichenzia Ross Ference Carmel LLP acted as placement agent counsel, while Manatt, Phelps & Phillips, LLP served as counsel to Healthcare Triangle, Inc.

    The common stock, pre-funded warrants, series A warrants, series B warrants, and the common stock issuable upon the conversion of these securities have not been registered under the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, or any state securities laws. Until registered, these securities may not be offered or sold in the United States or any state absent registration or an applicable exemption from registration requirements.

    This press release does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction where such offer, solicitation, or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under applicable securities laws.

    About Spartan Capital Securities, LLC

    Spartan Capital Securities, LLC is a premier full-service investment banking firm offering a comprehensive range of advisory services to institutional clients and high-net-worth individuals. Known for its expertise in capital raising, strategic advisory, and asset management, Spartan Capital delivers tailored solutions to meet clients’ financial goals.

    For more information about Spartan Capital Securities, visit www.spartancapital.com.

    Contact: Spartan Capital Securities, LLC 45 Broadway, 19th Floor New York, NY 10006 investmentbanking@spartancapital.com

    The MIL Network –

  • MIL-OSI United Kingdom: expert reaction to unpublished preprint on inducing loss of function of genes in mice to produce woolly mammoth- like hair phenotypes

    Source: United Kingdom – Executive Government & Departments

    An unpublished preprint uploaded to BioRXiv looks at gene editing in mice to create woolly mammoth-like hair phenotypes. 

    Dr Tori Herridge, Senior Lecturer, School of Biosciences, University of Sheffield, said:

    Woolly Mouse in Context

    “Colossal have announced that they have successfully bred ‘woolly mice’, and this is a “water shed moment” in their mission to genetically engineer an arctic adapted elephant, aka “bringing back the mammoth.”

    “Colossal’s team made a number of genetic changes known as “knock outs” in lab mice that are already known to produce longer, thicker, wavier — or woollier — coats in mice. They also made a change known to cause blonde hair colouring in mice.

    “The result, therefore, of various “woolly mice” from these genetic changes is unsurprising: woolly mice have been produced in labs and by mice breeders many times before.”

     

    Mammoth-like genes?

    “Three of the genetic changes made in some of the mice were inspired by woolly mammoth DNA, but they still only show effects in mice. The mice were not edited to have a precise copy of the mammoth genes, but it is possible that these edits may have had a similar effect in both mice and mammoths (either by stopping the gene from working, or by changing the way the gene worked), but we cannot be sure about this.

    “It is also not possible to tell what impact these ‘mammoth-inspired’ changes had, if any, in the Colossal woolly mouse owing to other gene edits made at the same time.”

     

    Are we a step closer to ‘bringing back the mammoth’? 

    “A mammoth is much more than just an elephant in a fur coat. While we know a lot about mouse genetics, we know much less about mammoths and elephants. It isn’t yet known which sections of the genome are vital for achieving the characters need to make an elephant fit for life in the Arctic circle. Genes that are linked to fur and fat in well-studied animals like mice are obvious targets, but the devil is in the detail. And what about other characters that are equally important? Which bits of the genome underpin the teeth and jaw changes that might be needed to accommodate an Arctic diet, for example (mammoth teeth were clearly under strong evolutionary pressure to adapt to their diet)? What about things we haven’t even discovered yet, things we don’t know we don’t know?

    “Unless you decide to make EVERY edit necessary to in the genome, you are only ever going to create a crude approximation of any extinct creature, based on an incomplete idea of what it should look like. You are never going to ‘bring back’ a mammoth.

    “Colossal’s Woolly Mouse experiments also show that de-extinction attempts are fraught with failure: most gene-edited embryos failed to result in live pups (less than 10%), and very few of those born were successfully edited for all target genes. This is for experiments that made a small number of relatively simple (loss of function) changes in well understood genes, using a ‘model’ lab animal as a surrogate.

    “Engineering a mammoth-like elephant presents a far greater challenge: the actual number of genes likely to be involved is far higher, the genes are less well understood (and still need to be identified), and the surrogate will be an animal that is not normally experimented upon. Even if success rates are similar to those observed in the woolly mice (and they may well be lower given the greater number of edits and unknowns), there will likely need to be multiple pregnancies before a “successful” calf is born. This equates to either a very large number of surrogate dams, or – given elephant pregnancies last approximately 2-years – a very long time.

    “Mammoth de-extinction doesn’t seem to be on the horizon anytime soon.”

    Ethical Considerations

    “Colossal’s Woolly Mouse experiments show that the physical effect of genome-editing cannot be observed until the animal experimentation stage. This will also be true in elephants.

    “Although it is branded as “woolly mammoth de-extinction”, what is being proposed is an experiment to test the effect of certain gene edits on the appearance of elephants.

    “For the mice in these experiments the risk was small: the effect of these gene edits already known, and were not likely to cause risk or suffering to surrogate or pup.

    “We do not know the risk involved for elephants, but it could be very high.

    “We do know that surrogacy is a burden on the dam, and that captive elephant pregnancies carry risks even under normal circumstances.

    “Placing such a burden of risk on an elephant surrogate in pursuit of an experiment that – at best – will produce a simulacrum of a woolly mammoth, is unjustifiable.”

    Dr Saad Arif, Senior Lecturer, School of Biological and Medical Sciences, Oxford Brookes University, said:

    Is there enough info to comment on the announcement, how well can we judge what has been accomplished and how it has been done?

    “The preprint provides enough information on what has been accomplished and how it was conducted.”

     

    How novel is the research and techniques to create the mouse, is it more than just genetically engineered lab animals? Is this something more special?

    “One novel element of the work seems to be the use of genome-editing technologies to alter multiple genes at once with high efficiency and speed in mice. Although we have had the ability to alter multiple genes at once for sometime, the efficiency and speed with which these changes can be made could still be improved. Based on the results presented by the authors, their methods for generating transgenic mice with the desired changes appears to be both rapid and highly efficient, which would be extremely desirable when testing for the function of genetic changes in any context, whether it has implications for conservation or disease biology.

    “Genome-editing can also lead to unintended edits in non-targeted parts of the genome resulting in unwanted modifications, so-called off-target effects. Although, the authors report no missense mutations (potentially eradicating or modifying an untargeted gene’s function), this is not demonstrable proof that  gene function hasn’t been altered. Such off-target effects could be detrimental in real world applications of genome-editing e.g. curing a disease or in trying to turn an ‘elephant” into a mammoth’.

    “Another novel aspect of this study is that some of the genes targeted by the authors are based on  their comparisons of ancient mammoth and modern elephant genomes. This set of genes (in contrast to most of the others, which are selected based on information from mice studies) comprise those with identified differences between cold-adapted mammoths and their warm-adapted elephant cousins. Hence differences in these  genes could potentially be part of the cold adaptation repertoire of mammoths. This really paves the way for exploring the consequences of genomic differences in extinct species or populations.”

    How is this proof of principle for the research missions of the company?

    “It shows that Colossal have a model system to validate predicted effects of the DNA differences they have identified between mammoth and elephant genomes and which of these differences is relevant for mammoth’s cold adaptations. For example, they identified differences in DNA sequences of a gene that controls hair length both in Elephants and Mammals, they then introduced that difference in their mouse model, via genome editing, and determined that the  change does indeed affect hair growth. The ability to edit genomes. rapidly and efficiently, to test the role of DNA changes will help them prioritize which genetic modifications are relevant for cold adaptation. 

    “However, it is important to note that their ability to predict whether a gene controls hair growth comes from work done in mice, humans and other organisms. Not all genes will have functional effects that are so easy to predict because not all genes are as well studied and screening for the effect of alterations in these genes may not be as straightforward.  Many genes, unlike those that control hair colour or some aspect of outward appearance, may not have immediate or directly observable effects. Finally, given the idiosyncrasies of mouse biology, some genetic edits will just not manifest themselves in the same way as they would in mammoths or their relatives. The authors acknowledge this and this is a well-known issue with the use of mice in studying human genetics as well. Hence, being able to test whether a specific difference between mammoths and elephants is related to the former’s cold tolerance is still challenging.”

    What are the implications of this research? How close are we getting to the “de-extinction” of the Woolly Mammoth? Does this have significance in conservation biology?
    “I think we are still very far from their “de-extinction” goal. The elephant and mammoth genomes are considered to be 96.4% identical, however, that still leaves potentially another ~13 million changes in DNA sequence to consider! It is also still unclear how mammoth cold adaptation phenotypes without a clear outward manifestation, could be identified or screened in mice.

    “Additionally, at the moment it is difficult to see how they will “birth” a mammoth-like elephant as that may also require some additional technical advances and ethical considerations as this may require elephant surrogacy. Nonetheless, it still remains a goal worth striving for because of potential technical advances they could be achieved along the way. I wouldn’t mind being proven wrong on this.
    “I see this as a fairly small step towards their “de-extinction” goal and I still see us far from any direct impact in conservation biology. Nonetheless, being able to test the genetic effects of DNA differences discovered from extinct species and populations could help us identify the genes and sequence differences involved in making organisms more adaptable to their environments. 

    “Finally, the  efficiency and speed of their multiplex genome-editing technologies is promising and perhaps the most impactful part of their work. These methods could have implications for human disease and biology and help us understand, and potentially treat, complex genetic diseases or traits that are controlled by multiple genes.”

    Is there any ethical significance of this research to consider?

    “I don’t think the results of the current research are of any ethical significance. However, later down the line, the idea of ‘birthing a mammoth’ via an elephant (an endangered species) surrogacy will surely raise ethical concerns.”

    Dr Louise Johnson, Evolutionary Biologist, University of Reading, said:

    “Seeing these mice is a bit like looking back at the past, but with a highly selective telescope. This technology offers an exciting opportunity to test some of our ideas about extinct organisms.

    “It is an interesting piece of work, but the idea that we could bring something back from extinction is false hope.

    “What has been done here is not trivial, but of the ten different mutations engineered into the mice, only a few actually make the mouse gene closer to a known mammoth gene. The result does show that it is possible to genetically engineer many genes at once and still produce some live mice at the end of the process, though. The researchers have succeeded in nudging the mouse genome in the direction of a mammoth genome, which is a first.

    “If we have an idea of what a gene might do in an extinct mammal, this technology can produce powerful results by introducing a very similar sequence into a mouse. But in this particular case, most of the mutations are chosen just because they are already known to make mice have longer, coarser, wavier hair. You could, in theory, produce mice like this by just breeding mice with weird hair together.

    “In theory, you could introduce a gene for hairiness into an elephant and it would look quite mammoth-like, but it wouldn’t be a mammoth in any meaningful way. Elephants would be a terrible species to do this research with – they are huge, have long gestation periods, and require highly specialist housing and care. The mouse is a brilliant lab animal, and we know a lot about the mouse genome and how to alter it effectively. 

    “You do have to know a bit about how the extinct genes might work. For example, it was already known that the genes for coat colour and texture were similar in the mammoth and the mouse. Being able to create and introduce a mouse gene that is somewhat the same as the mammoth opens up a new way to look at evolutionary genetics.”

    Dr Alena Pance, Senior Lecturer in Genetics, University of Hertfordshire, said:

    “Genetic engineering in mice has been performed for a very long time using, developing, and testing a variety of technologies. These modifications include introducing traits from other species, notoriously ‘humanised mice’ that have been used for research related to human traits and disease.

    “The decoding of an extinct species genome to identify specific genes associated with particular traits has also been done before, where the physical characteristics of ancient humans have been deduced from their genomic data.

    “Perhaps the novelty here is using mice to confirm the assumptions about correlations between genes and specific traits. The press release gives the impression that mammoth genes were introduced to mice but from the preprint, it transpires that the genomic editing in these mice consists of inducing loss of function of several genes simultaneously. The choice of these genes comes from observed spontaneous mutations in mice that impact traits such as coat and comparative analyses of elephant and mammoth genomes that reveal similar loss of function in some of these genes.

    “The ability to use mice in order to examine and test gene-trait relationships and hypotheses about physical characteristics specifically using genomes from extinct organisms might prove useful, but overall not particularly novel.”

    Prof Dusko Ilic, Professor of Stem Cell Science, King’s College London, said:

    “The achievement described in the latest press release regarding “woolly mice” is interesting, particularly in terms of the strategy used to refine the list of genes related to hair growth that were also compatible with their model organism—the mouse. This is indeed a noteworthy milestone.

    “Once the gene list has been established, engineering mutations in mice, including those involving seven genes, is a well-established process and not particularly challenging.

    “With mice, the process is relatively straightforward. Their gestation period is only three weeks, and they typically give birth to six to eight pups per litter. However, translating this approach to elephants presents significant challenges. Elephants have the longest gestation period of any mammal—approximately two years—and generally give birth to a single calf. Furthermore, it will take 10-14 years for them to be sexually mature.

    “Assisted reproductive technologies (ART), including in vitro fertilization (IVF), have seen limited success in elephants. The primary ART method employed in elephants has been artificial insemination (AI). The Indianapolis Zoo achieved a significant milestone in 2000 by facilitating the first successful birth of an African elephant conceived through AI. In 2023, the same zoo announced that a 16-year-old African elephant named Zahara was pregnant via AI, marking the first instance where an elephant born through AI is expecting a calf conceived by the same method.

    “This raises critical questions: How many elephant cows would need to undergo experimental pregnancies to give a birth to a “woolly elephant”? And how long would it take before the first such hybrid is born?”

    Dr Denis Headon, Group Leader and Senior Research Fellow, The Roslin Institute, University of Edinburgh, said:

    “With a long-term goal of advancing the de-extinction of the mammoth, the team have managed to alter several mouse genes in one step. They chose these gene alterations based largely on things that we know about mice, rather than what we know about mammoths. This approach produced very shaggy mice with a coat that resembles that of the woolly mammoth remains we find today. While the mice have a striking golden coat, they are otherwise healthy, indicating that the method used is not harmful. Certainly this is an advance in speeding up the rate of genetic modification towards the many changes that distinguish one species from another, though it’s not clear that these changes alone would alter a relatively hairless elephant into a woolly animal. Further work on either synthesising or understanding the mammoth genome would also be required to go beyond these superficial characteristics to generate an animal that would, for example, have the right behaviour to live in Arctic conditions. This paper reports an important advance not only for de-extinction but for animal breeding in general.”

    An unpublished preprint titled ‘Multiplex-edited mice recapitulate woolly mammoth hair phenotypes’ by Rui Chen et al. was uploaded to BioRXiv on 13:00 UK time Tuesday 4 March. 

    Declared interests

    Dr Saad Arif: None

    Dr Louise Johnson: None

    Dr Alena Pance: I can confirm I have no conflict of interest regarding this story

    Prof Dusko Ilic: I declare no conflicts of interest.

    Dr Denis Headon: I don’t have any interests to declare on this paper/story.

    For all other experts, no response for our request for DOIs was received.

    MIL OSI United Kingdom –

  • MIL-OSI Russia: Parliamentary delegation from Indonesia to HSE: new prospects for cooperation

    Translartion. Region: Russians Fedetion –

    Source: State University Higher School of Economics – State University Higher School of Economics –

    © Higher School of Economics

    On February 24, a meeting with a delegation of the Committee on Interparliamentary Cooperation of the Council of People’s Representatives of the Republic of Indonesia was held at the HSE on Pokrovsky Boulevard. The event was attended by the Vice-Rector of the University, the Head of the BRICS Expert Council – Russia Victoria Panova and representatives of the university’s scientific departments and centers. During the meeting, the parties discussed key areas for strengthening scientific and expert cooperation, and joint initiatives in the field of science and technology, including through BRICS.

    A delegation from the People’s Representative Council (PRC) Committee on Inter-Parliamentary Cooperation visited the university for the first time. Earlier in the day, a meeting of the Chairman of the Committee of the Council of the Federation of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation on International Affairs with the head of the Committee of the People’s Commissars of the Republic of Indonesia, Mr. Mardani Ali Sera.

    HSE Vice-Rector Victoria Panova welcomed the guests and said that the university is actively developing international cooperation and highly values the opportunities for interaction with Indonesia. She emphasized that HSE is not only one of the leading educational and research centers in Russia, but also a key participant in the work of BRICS: “The Higher School of Economics was chosen as an expert center for analytical and scientific work on BRICS, as it is a modern and young university that is actively developing in such key areas as IT, neuroscience, fundamental physics, and STEM in general. The BRICS Expert Council (BRICS EC) is not just a division created to support the Russian Federation’s chairmanship of BRICS in 2024. We work in long-term areas of political, socio-economic and humanitarian cooperation, conduct research and create platforms for knowledge exchange between the countries of the association.”

    Victoria Panova expressed hope for further strengthening of relations between Russia and Indonesia. “Our task is to offer Indonesia not only educational opportunities, but also expert support in various fields. We are ready for active cooperation and hope that Indonesia will take an active part in the work of the BRICS expert track,” Victoria Panova said.

    Mr. Mardani Ali Sera, in turn, noted that Indonesia is deeply interested in strengthening ties with Russia through multilateral formats, in particular BRICS, and expressed a desire to also develop bilateral relations at all levels. “We are pleased that cooperation between Russia and Indonesia has intensified in recent years. Our country is interested in interacting, including with the BRICS-Russia Expert Council based at the Higher School of Economics. We see what a significant contribution the BRICS ES makes to achieving the common goals of the association: national strategies, economic and scientific and technological development. We are confident that joint work will open up new opportunities for us, especially in the field of using technology and innovation,” Mr. Mardani Ali Sera emphasized.

    Deputy Chairman of the Inter-Parliamentary Cooperation Committee Mr. Fadlullah Muhammad Hussein said that Indonesia sees many prospects in cooperation with BRICS: “BRICS offers us great opportunities for cooperation. All member countries communicate on an equal basis and can freely choose which line to work on. BRICS is about all aspects of building a fair world order,” he added.

    Representatives of the National Research University Higher School of Economics emphasized the importance of constant interaction in the scientific research sphere. Alexander Sokolov, Deputy Director Institute for Statistical Studies and Economics of Knowledge, National Research University Higher School of Economics, director Foresight Center spoke about the development of new technologies that could be useful for Indonesia: “Our institute is actively developing the foresight direction, creating innovative methodologies and tools for forecasting and modeling future trends in various fields of science and technology. We conduct research aimed at building long-term trends in areas such as space, medicine, energy and IT, and are ready to offer our expertise and resources for work with Indonesia. Joint efforts will allow us to better understand how new technologies can shape the future of economies and societies.”

    Director Institute of Trade Policy, National Research University Higher School of Economics, BRICS ES expert Alexander Daniltsev noted the importance of trade relations for BRICS member countries. He expressed confidence that Indonesia will become a reliable partner not only for Russia. “International trade and economic cooperation issues occupy a key place within BRICS, and we are confident that Indonesia can become an important partner for all countries of the association. We are actively exploring the possibilities of developing trade relations in such strategically important areas as energy, agriculture and high technology. It is important that our joint projects contribute to stable growth and deepening of mutually beneficial cooperation, as well as open up new prospects for all BRICS members,” he said.

    Ekaterina Shamina, Deputy Director for Scientific Projects Directorate for Scientific Projects of the National Research University Higher School of Economics, drew attention to the possibility of joint work with Indonesia in the field of artificial intelligence regulation: “We are developing standards for regulating artificial intelligence in Russia, and this is one of the key areas for BRICS in the coming years. We would like to offer our Indonesian colleagues cooperation in developing a common AI testing system that could be implemented in the BRICS countries. This will allow us to work on the safe and ethical use of new technologies,” she said.

    Alexander Larichev, Deputy Dean for Research Faculty of Law informed Indonesian parliamentarians that the HSE has launched an initiative – the BRICS Law School Consortium, within the framework of which exchanges between players in the field of law are planned, and scientific publications are already being prepared: “We are implementing a lot. Many universities in the BRICS countries have already joined us. The subjects that we are developing are digital law, international commercial law and business law, etc. We will be glad to see Indonesian universities in our Consortium.”

    Natalia Zholnerovich, Deputy Dean Faculty of Geography and Geoinformation Technologies HSE noted that the faculty was founded in partnership with the Russian Academy of Sciences and its areas of activity are much broader than just geography. “We are developing specific areas of geography: climate change and adaptation to it; climate risk assessment at different levels; migration and urban systems; strategy and territorial planning based on technological solutions; the relationship between people’s potential and the resilience of territories to various risk factors,” she explained.

    The parties discussed the prospects for joint research and analytical reports, agreed on further interaction and planning of joint events aimed at strengthening the partnership within the framework of the HSE and BRICS.

    Please note: This information is raw content directly from the source of the information. It is exactly what the source states and does not reflect the position of MIL-OSI or its clients.

    MIL OSI Russia News –

  • MIL-OSI: Instinct Brothers Co., Ltd, a Japanese Vertically Integrated Regenerative Medicine & Stem Cell Technology Company, to Go Public via Merger with Relativity Acquisition Corp.

    Source: GlobeNewswire (MIL-OSI)

    • Instinct Brothers Co., Ltd has entered into a definitive business combination agreement with Relativity Acquisition Corp.
    • The combined company, to be named Instinct Bio Technical Company Inc., will have an implied pro-form enterprise value of approximately $242 million, assuming no further redemptions by Relativity’s public stockholders prior to the closing of the business combination.

    NEW YORK, NY, TOKYO, JAPAN, March 04, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Instinct Brothers Co., Ltd., along with its affiliated entities—Hiroki Global Co., Ltd, Artisans Production Co., Ltd, Instinct RAS Co., Ltd (collectively, “Instinct Brothers” or the “Company”)—a vertically integrated regenerative medicine and stem cell technology company based in Japan, and Relativity Acquisition Corp. (“Relativity”), a special purpose acquisition company, today announced that they have entered into a definitive business combination agreement (the “Merger Agreement”) that will result in Instinct Brothers becoming a wholly-owned subsidiary of Relatively upon the closing of the transaction contemplated therein (the “Proposed Transaction”) in accordance with the terms and conditions in the Merger Agreement.

    Upon closing the Proposed Transaction, the combined company will operate under the name Instinct Bio Technical Company Inc. (the “Combined Company”) and intends to list on the NASDAQ Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol ‘BIOT’.

    A Pioneering, Vertically Integrated Platform for Regenerative Medicine

    With a mission to harness the transformative power of stem cell science, Instinct Brothers has built an ecosystem that integrates stem-cell-based cosmeceuticals, research and development, university partnerships, proprietary manufacturing, industry-leading alliances, global distribution, branding, direct-to-consumer retail, medical consulting and total coordination service for franchise medical clinics, and clinical application research in regenerative medicine.

    By leveraging a high-quality stem cell culture medium with over 380 cytokines and growth factors, Instinct Brothers has positioned itself in the field of stem cell-derived skincare. Through its franchise GENREVER Clinic, the Company has developed a structured model for stem cell-based regenerative therapies targeting anti-aging, immune support, regenerative treatments, and disease prevention.

    Additionally, Instinct Brothers owns and operates ARTISANS PRODUCTION CO., LTD, an ISO 9001-certified manufacturing facility, allowing for seamless production of cosmeceuticals and medical-grade regenerative products. This facility enables precision manufacturing, stringent quality control, and continuous innovation, reinforcing Instinct Brothers’ commitment to excellence in stem cell technology and regenerative medicine.

    The Instinct Brothers management team, led by its founder Tomoki Nagano, will continue to run the Combined Company after the closing of the Proposed Transaction.

    Tomoki Nagano, Group Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Instinct Brothers, said:
    “This transaction marks a transformational milestone for Instinct Brothers, positioning us to accelerate our global expansion and enhance access to cutting-edge stem cell-based therapies. Going public will allow us to scale our operations, broaden our clinical footprint, and fuel the development of new regenerative treatments that improve health and longevity. We are committed to bringing life-changing solutions to a global audience with plans to expand our clinic model into Malaysia and Indonesia, construct new clinics in Japan, and advance our Cell Processing Center joint venture.”

    Tarek Tabsh, Chief Executive Officer of Relativity Acquisition Corp., commented:
    “Perinatal stem cells have an intrinsic capacity to repair and regenerate targeted tissues, and unique adaptability that makes them a promising frontier for regenerative medicine application potential. Instinct Brothers has built a well-integrated business that delivers scientific innovation from the bench to the bedside. Their vertically integrated platform, spanning research, manufacturing, distribution, retail, and clinical application, positions them uniquely for expansion into adjacent markets. We are excited to support their journey as they continue to deliver the next generation of regenerative medicine.”

    Transaction Overview

    Under the terms of the Merger Agreement, Relativity will acquire all issued and outstanding shares of Instinct Brothers, making it a wholly owned subsidiary of Relativity. As part of the Proposed Transaction, Instinct Brothers will become a publicly traded entity under the name “Instinct Bio Technical Company Inc.” The Proposed Transaction values the Combined Company at an estimated pro forma enterprise value of approximately $242 million. The Proposed Transaction is expected to close in Q3 2025, subject to approval by Relativity’s stockholders and other customary closing conditions outlined in the Merger Agreement.

    Advisors

    Chardan Capital Markets LLC is the exclusive M&A and Capital Markets advisor to Instinct Brothers Holdings. Darryl, Edward & Co. is a legal advisor for Instinct Brothers Holdings.

    Loeb & Loeb LLP and Barnett & Linn LLP serve as legal advisors to Relativity Acquisition Corp.

    About Instinct Brothers

    Instinct Brothers is a vertically integrated Japanese company specializing in stem cell technology and regenerative medicine, encompassing research and development, manufacturing, distribution, retail, and clinical applications. Founded in 2017, Instinct Brothers is led by industry expert Tomoki Nagano, Group Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, an industry expert with a vision to drive innovation in regenerative medicine. The Company’s mission is to advance stem cell science, enhance patient outcomes, and pioneer the next generation of stem cell-based therapies.

    About Relativity Acquisition Corp.

    Relativity Acquisition Corp. is a blank check company sponsored by Relativity Acquisition Sponsor LLC, a Delaware limited liability company, formed for the purpose of effecting a merger, capital stock exchange, asset acquisition, stock purchase, reorganization, or similar business combination with one or more businesses.

    Additional Information and Where to Find It

    In connection with the Proposed Transaction, Relativity and Instinct Brothers intends to file a Registration Statement on Form F-4 (the “Form F-4”) with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission ( the “SEC”), which will include a preliminary prospectus with respect to its securities to be issued in connection with the Proposed Transaction and a preliminary proxy statement with regard to Relativity’s stockholder meeting at which Relativity’s stockholders will be asked to vote on the Proposed Transaction. Relativity’s investors, stockholders and other interested persons are advised to read, when available, the Form F-4, including the proxy statement/prospectus, any amendments thereto and any other documents filed with the SEC, because these documents will contain important information about the proposed business combination. After the Form F-4 has been filed and declared effective, Relativity will mail the definitive proxy statement/prospectus to stockholders of Relativity as of a record date to be established for voting on the business combination. Relativity stockholders will also be able to obtain a copy of such documents, without charge, by directing a request to: Relativity Acquisition Corp., 3753 Howard Hughes Parkway, Suite 200 Las Vegas, Nevada 89169; e-mail: info@relativityacquisitions.com. These documents, once available, can also be obtained, without charge, at the SEC’s website www.sec.gov.

    Participants in the Solicitation

    Relativity and its directors and officers may be deemed participants in soliciting proxies of Relativity’s stockholders in connection with the proposed business combination. Security holders may obtain more detailed information regarding the names, affiliations and interests of certain of Relativity’s executive officers and directors in the solicitation by reading Relativity’s final prospectus filed with the SEC on February 14, 2022, the proxy statement/prospectus and other relevant materials filed with the SEC in connection with the business combination when they become available. Information concerning the interests of Relativity’s participants in the solicitation, which may, in some cases, be different from those of their stockholders generally, will be set forth in the proxy statement/prospectus relating to the business combination when it becomes available.

    No Offer or Solicitation

    This press release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy, or the solicitation of any vote or approval in any jurisdiction in connection with a proposed potential business combination among Relativity and Instinct Brothers or any related transactions, nor shall there be any sale, issuance or transfer of securities in any jurisdiction where, or to any person to whom, such offer, solicitation or sale may be unlawful. Any offering of securities or solicitation of votes regarding the proposed transaction will be made only by means of a proxy statement/prospectus that complies with applicable rules and regulations promulgated under the Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the “Securities Act”), and Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, or pursuant to an exemption from the Securities Act or in a transaction not subject to the registration requirements of the Securities Act.

    Forward Looking Statements

    This press release may include, and oral statements made from time to time by representatives of the Company may include “forward-looking statements”. Statements regarding possible business combinations and the financing thereof, and related matters, as well as all other statements other than statements of historical fact included in this press release, are forward-looking statements. When used in this press release, words such as “anticipate,” “believe,” “continue,” “could,” “estimate,” “expect,” “intend,” “may,” “might,” “plan,” “possible,” “potential,” “predict,” “project,” “should,” “would” and similar expressions, as they relate to us or our management team, identify forward-looking statements. Such forward-looking statements are based on the beliefs of management, as well as assumptions made by, and information currently available to, the Company’s management. Actual results could differ materially from those contemplated by the forward-looking statements as a result of certain factors detailed in the Company’s filings with the SEC. All subsequent written or oral forward-looking statements attributable to us or persons acting on our behalf are qualified in their entirety by this paragraph. Forward-looking statements are subject to numerous conditions, many of which are beyond the control of the Company, including those set forth in the Risk Factors section of the Form F-4 and prospectus to be filed with the SEC. The Company and Relativity undertake no obligation to update these statements for revisions or changes after the date of this release except as required by law.

    Contact Information

    Instinct Brothers Co., Ltd.

    Email: ir@instinct-biot.com

    Website: https://instinct-bro.com/

    Relativity Acquisition Corp.

    Email: info@relativityacquisitions.com

    Website: www.relativityacquisitions.com

    The MIL Network –

  • MIL-OSI Russia: Dmitry Chernyshenko: Representatives of 185 countries took part in the Olympiad of the Global Universities Association for admission to Russian universities

    Translartion. Region: Russians Fedetion –

    Source: Government of the Russian Federation – An important disclaimer is at the bottom of this article.

    The announcement of the winners for the PhD and postdoc tracks was a big success result the eighth international Olympiad. The organizers of the intellectual competitions are 24 Russian universities – members of the association “Global Universities”, successfully developing in the global market of education and research.

    “The Olympiad of the Global Universities Association contributes to achieving one of the indicators of the national project “Youth and Children” – increasing the number of foreign students by 2030 to 500 thousand. In 2024, about 150 thousand people from 185 countries took part in it, which is more than twice the results of the previous year. The winners of the Olympiad will have the right to study in Russia locally within the quota of the Government of the Russian Federation for foreign citizens,” said Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Chernyshenko.

    As noted by the head of the Ministry of Education and Science Valery Falkov, a special feature of the 2024 selection was the launch of a postdoc track, which is aimed at attracting young foreign scientists to work in scientific projects of Russian universities. Holders of a candidate of science or PhD degree from a foreign university are given the opportunity to find employment in one of the research projects offered by the organizing universities.

    “We see that the trend for academic mobility remains stable throughout the world, the number of foreign students in Russia is growing. And one of the successful tools of this work is holding such large-scale events as the international Olympiad,” the minister said.

    The track for undergraduate students also started for the first time. The winners and prize winners were 2,129 people, the master’s track – 3,928 people, the postgraduate track – 234 people, and among postdocs – 11. In total, this year the participants filled out almost 362 thousand portfolios. The organizers noted the increase in the activity of the participants and a significant improvement in the quality of their preparation: the average score increased at all stages of the intellectual competitions, despite the increased entry requirements for applicants.

    The Olympiad is held in 14 broad subject profiles:

    — Computer and Data Science

    — Business and management

    — Engineering and technology

    — Clinical medicine and public health

    — Biology and biotechnology

    — Political science and international relations

    — Applied Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence

    — Education and psychology

    — Earth and Environmental Sciences

    — Economics and econometrics

    — Linguistics and modern languages

    — Physical and technical sciences

    — Urbanism and civil engineering

    — Chemistry and Materials Science

    The International Olympiad (known internationally under the brand Russian Scholarship Project Open Doors) has been held since 2017. During this time, more than 500 thousand people from 222 countries of the world took part in it, about 90% of them live in Asia and Africa. More than 12 thousand winners and prize winners received the right to free education in the best Russian universities.

    The universities that are members of the Global Universities Association include the universities that are members of the Global Universities Association and the organizers of the Olympiad.

    1. Federal State Autonomous Educational Institution of Higher Education “National Research University “Higher School of Economics”

    2. Federal State Autonomous Educational Institution of Higher Education “Samara National Research University named after Academician S.P. Korolev”.

    3. Federal State Autonomous Educational Institution of Higher Education “National Research University ITMO”

    4. Federal State Autonomous Educational Institution of Higher Education “National Research Tomsk State University”

    5. Federal State Autonomous Educational Institution of Higher Education “Ural Federal University named after the first President of Russia B.N. Yeltsin”

    6.Federal State Autonomous Educational Institution of Higher Education “Far Eastern Federal University”

    7. Federal State Autonomous Educational Institution of Higher Education “Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (National Research University)”

    8. Federal State Autonomous Educational Institution of Higher Education “Moscow Polytechnic University”

    9. Federal State Autonomous Educational Institution of Higher Education “Tyumen State University”

    10. Federal State Autonomous Educational Institution of Higher Education “Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University”

    11. Federal State Autonomous Educational Institution of Higher Education “Siberian Federal University”

    12. Federal State Autonomous Educational Institution of Higher Education “Kazan (Volga Region) Federal University”

    13. Federal State Autonomous Educational Institution of Higher Education “National Research Tomsk Polytechnic University”

    14. Federal State Autonomous Educational Institution of Higher Education “Moscow State Institute of International Relations (University) of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation”

    15. Federal State Autonomous Educational Institution of Higher Education “National Research Nizhny Novgorod State University named after N.I. Lobachevsky”

    16. Federal State Autonomous Educational Institution of Higher Education “Novosibirsk National Research State University”

    17. Federal State Autonomous Educational Institution of Higher Education “National Research Technological University “MISIS”

    18. Federal State Autonomous Educational Institution of Higher Education “National Research Nuclear University MEPhI”

    19. Federal State Autonomous Educational Institution of Higher Education “Southern Federal University”

    20. Federal State Autonomous Educational Institution of Higher Education “Saint Petersburg State Electrotechnical University “LETI” named after V.I. Ulyanov (Lenin)”

    21. Federal State Autonomous Educational Institution of Higher Education “Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia named after Patrice Lumumba”

    22. Federal State Budgetary Educational Institution of Higher Education “National Research Moscow State University of Civil Engineering”

    23. Federal State Budgetary Educational Institution of Higher Education “First Moscow State Medical University named after I.M. Sechenov” of the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation (Sechenov University)

    24. Federal State Budgetary Educational Institution of Higher Education “Bauman Moscow State Technical University (National Research University)”, as well as the university – co-organizer of the Olympiad in the postgraduate track

    25. Federal State Budgetary Educational Institution of Higher Education “Siberian State Medical University” of the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation

    Please note: This information is raw content directly from the source of the information. It is exactly what the source states and does not reflect the position of MIL-OSI or its clients.

    MIL OSI Russia News –

  • MIL-OSI Russia: Tatyana Golikova: The XI St. Petersburg International Forum of United Cultures will be held in the first half of September

    Translartion. Region: Russians Fedetion –

    Source: Government of the Russian Federation – An important disclaimer is at the bottom of this article.

    Meeting of the organizing committee for the preparation and holding of the XI St. Petersburg International Forum of United Cultures under the leadership of Tatyana Golikova.

    March 4, 2025

    Previous news Next news

    The XI St. Petersburg International Forum of United Cultures will be held in the first half of September. The corresponding decision was made on March 3 at a meeting of the organizing committee for its preparation and holding under the leadership of Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova.

    “We have gained experience in preparing the Forum of United Cultures and are improving it every year,” said Tatyana Golikova. “Despite the COVID period and the resumption of the forum in an updated format at a time when some countries attempted to cancel Russian culture, the platform is working successfully and uniting cultural figures of the world. This year, the forum will be held in the first half of September.”

    The main theme of the forum is “Return to Culture – New Opportunities”, said Tatyana Golikova. The business program venues will traditionally be the General Staff Building of the State Hermitage Museum, the spaces of the State Russian Museum and the State Academic Chapel of St. Petersburg.

    The forum’s cultural program will include a concert on Palace Square and a gala concert of opera and ballet stars at the Mikhailovsky Theater.

    The head of the Ministry of Culture of Russia, Olga Lyubimova, presented a report on the preparation of the forum at the meeting.

    “In 2025, we propose increasing the total maximum number of participants to 2,000 people. It is expected that Russian participation will be expanded by increasing quotas for subjects of the Russian Federation, as well as by attracting more cultural figures and special guests,” Olga Lyubimova noted.

    Thematic sections will be headed by Deputy Minister of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation Konstantin Mogilevsky, General Director of the Presidential Foundation for Cultural Initiatives Roman Karmanov, General Director of the State Hermitage Museum Mikhail Piotrovsky, Director of the Russian Ethnographic Museum Yulia Kupina, Chairman of VEB.RF Igor Shuvalov, First Deputy General Director of the Russian Information Agency ITAR-TASS Mikhail Gusman, Executive Director of the Cinema Fund Fyodor Sosnov, Artistic Director of the State Theatre of Nations Yevgeny Mironov, General Director of the State Academic Capella of St. Petersburg Olga Khomova, General Director of the Bolshoi Moscow State Circus on Vernadsky Avenue Edgar Zapashny.

    A new section, “Artistic Education,” will be added, curated by the rector of the Russian Institute of Theatre Arts (GITIS) Grigory Zaslavsky.

    The forum will cover the 80th anniversary of the Great Victory. The Russian news agency ITAR-TASS proposed organizing a photo exhibition “The Muses Were Not Silent” based on materials from its archives.

    The General Director of the Presidential Fund for Cultural Initiatives Roman Karmanov spoke about the events of the section “Culture and New Technologies”, and the Vice-Governor of St. Petersburg Boris Piotrovsky spoke about the regional program of the forum.

    Proposals for the future program of the forum were made by Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Russia Alexander Pankin, Special Representative of the President of Russia for International Cultural Cooperation Mikhail Shvydkoi, and Chairman of the Synodal Department of the Moscow Patriarchate for Church-Society Relations and the Media Vladimir Legoida.

    The head of the Directorate of the St. Petersburg International Forum of United Cultures, Vladimir Kekhman, said that at least 300 representatives of Russian and foreign media are expected.

    Tatyana Golikova at the award ceremony for the participants and organizers of the 10th St. Petersburg International Forum of United Cultures

    The Government House also hosted an awards ceremony for the participants and organizers of the 10th St. Petersburg International Forum of United Cultures. The Deputy Prime Minister presented them with certificates of honor and gratitude from the Russian Government.

    Please note: This information is raw content directly from the source of the information. It is exactly what the source states and does not reflect the position of MIL-OSI or its clients.

    MIL OSI Russia News –

  • MIL-OSI USA: Computational Astrophysicist Daniel Anglés-Alcázar Awarded Sloan Research Fellowship

    Source: US State of Connecticut

    Daniel Anglés-Alcázar, assistant professor of physics, has been awarded a 2025 Sloan Research Fellowship, one of the most competitive honors for early-career researchers in the United States and Canada.  

    Anglés-Alcázar was one of 126 scientists selected by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the fellowship, which recognizes researchers for their exceptional creativity and potential to lead in their fields. The fellowship provides a two-year, $75,000 grant to support research at the recipient’s discretion. 

    Daniel Anglés-Alcázar, assistant professor of physics and 2025 Sloan Research Fellow. (Photo courtesy of Daniel Anglés-Alcázar).

    “It’s a great honor to be selected as a Sloan Fellow,” says Anglés-Alcázar. “This is a significant recognition for our research program, and I am very grateful to the long-term collaborators and mentors that have supported me throughout my career.” 

    “The Sloan Research Fellows represent the very best of early-career science, embodying the creativity, ambition, and rigor that drive discovery forward,” says Adam F. Falk, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “These extraordinary scholars are already making significant contributions, and we are confident they will shape the future of their fields in remarkable ways.” 

    A computational astrophysicist, Anglés-Alcázar’s research focuses on developing simulations on supercomputers to understand how galaxies form and evolve. He uses theoretical models to interpret observations of galaxies, including how supermassive black holes impact galaxy evolution.  

    Observations suggest that when supermassive black holes grow, they release a huge amount of energy in the form of powerful winds or large-scale jets. However, the details of this process remain a mystery, according to Anglés-Alcázar.  

    “It’s still a big enigma,” he says. “In our models, we can make predictions of what happens when supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies power these large-scale winds or jets. Based on those models, we can infer that supermassive black holes indeed play a key role in how massive galaxies evolve, as well as the larger scale structures in the universe.” 

    Simulation modeling the evolution of a group of galaxies (left) and zooming in down to the nuclear region of the main galaxy (right), where the central supermassive black hole grows and affects its environment. (Photo courtesy of Daniel Anglés-Alcázar and the FIRE collaboration).

    Prior to joining UConn in 2019, Anglés-Alcázar was a research fellow with the Flatiron Institute from 2017 to 2019. In 2014, he was selected as a postdoctoral fellow with the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA) at Northwestern University. Most recently, he was one of 25 recipients of the 2023 Cottrell Scholar Awards from the Research Corporation for Science Advancement. 

    Anglés-Alcázar plans to use the funding to support student researchers, fund conference travel, and enhance computational resources for his work. 

    “Receiving this fellowship is really a great honor,” says Anglés-Alcázar. “I’m also very grateful to the students and postdocs in my group for the amazing work they do, and just excited that this award will enable us to continue pushing the frontiers of computational galaxy formation in new directions.” 

    MIL OSI USA News –

  • MIL-OSI USA: UConn School of Business to Induct Five Distinguished Business Executives into ‘Hall of Fame’

    Source: US State of Connecticut

    The School of Business will induct five alumni business leaders into its ‘Hall of Fame’ during a dinner and ceremony on Friday, April 11 at the Hartford Marriott Downtown.

    The School’s signature event typically draws hundreds for a night of celebration.

    “This year, we proudly induct five exceptional alumni into the UConn School of Business Hall of Fame. Their remarkable achievements, leadership, and dedication to service place them among the most distinguished executives in their fields,’’ says Professor Greg Reilly, interim dean of the School of Business.

    “A highlight of the evening is hearing their reflections on their time at UConn and the invaluable advice they offer to students and young alumni,’’ he says. “The Hall of Fame celebration stands as one of the most inspiring and anticipated events of the year.”

    Tickets to the event, which is black-tie optional, are $175 each. There is still time to become an event sponsor as well. For reservations or additional information, please visit: alumni.business.uconn.edu.

    This year’s inductees include:

    Entrepreneur Trisha Bailey Believes in Exceptional Service

    Trisha Bailey, ’99 (CLAS) ’23 (HON) is an entrepreneur, and the founder and CEO of Bailey’s Pharmacy & Medical Equipment & Supplies, a company built on a culture of exceptional service. She oversees her flagship company, as well as other successful enterprises, employing more than 500 people and generating revenue in the hundreds of millions annually. She is also the mother of five.

    Tricia Bailey (contributed photo)

    Bailey graduated with a bachelor’s degree from UConn in 1999, majoring in human development and family relations, and received an honorary degree from the School of Pharmacy in 2023.

    A track standout at Weaver High School in Hartford, Bailey has been a generous donor to UConn Athletics and became the first woman to have a building named in her honor on campus. She is also involved in real estate development and housing; is a minority owner of NBA teams; and is the owner of the largest equestrian farm in Florida.

    A native of Jamaica, she is deeply committed to community impact, supporting underserved communities in her native land and in the U.S., supporting nursing programs, and food and toy drives.

    Her autobiography “UNBROKEN’’ addresses her complex life journey and shares her deeply held values of compassion, excellence, and empowerment.

    Laurie Havanec Led 300,000 Employees at CVS Health

    Laurie Havanec ’82 (BUS), ’94 JD recently retired from CVS Health, where she served as Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer. In that role, she was responsible for 300,000 employees. Prior to joining CVS, Havanec served as Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer at Otis Worldwide Corporation, including during its transition from United Technologies Corporation to an independent, publicly traded company.

    Laurie Havanec (contributed photo)

    Havanec earned her bachelor’s degree, with a marketing major, from the School of Business in 1982. Six weeks after the birth of her second child, she returned to UConn to fill her longtime desire to study law at the UConn Law School. She completed her degree with honors.

    In 2019, Havanec endowed a need-based scholarship, through UConn Women and Philanthropy, to help women in their path to law school. She has served on the Board of Directors of American Water, as a member of the Board of Trustees for both the Connecticut Women’s Hall of Fame and the Connecticut Governor’s Committee on Workforce and Education. A two-time cancer survivor, Havanec has told her story many times to help educate women about the importance of breast-cancer detection and prevention.

    Inclusivity Always Important to John Hodson

    John Hodson ’85 (BUS), is the Founder and President of True Benefit, a division of AmWINS, a company that goes beyond traditional employee benefits to foster a culture of inclusivity, ethical practices, and community engagement. The company’s mission is to serve both business and the broader community and he has championed diversity, equity, and belonging throughout his career.

    John Hodson (contributed photo)

    Hodson earned his bachelor’s degree, with a marketing major, in 1985 and worked at The Travelers and ConnectiCare. He then became an insurance broker and eventually founded True Benefit. Since its inception, the company has grown to become the exclusive program and risk manager for ADP Total Source, the largest professional employer organization in the nation. True Benefit now serves more than 750,000 employees nationwide, overseeing more than $4 billion in healthcare premiums and delivering healthcare savings and solutions for small- to mid- sized businesses.

    A dedicated advocate for LGBTQ+ rights and racial equity, Hodson has worked to improve insurance policies for the transgender community, addressing gaps in coverage and access to mental health care. He is also a proud supporter of UConn’s Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) initiatives, with a focus on promoting mental health and the wellbeing of students. He is actively involved with several professional organizations and serves on the Board of Trustees at Sarah Lawrence College, which two of his children attended.

    Greg Lewis Served as SVP and CFO of Honeywell

    Greg Lewis ’91 (BUS) is the former Senior Vice President and CFO of Honeywell, a Fortune 100 company. This month, he will be stepping down from those roles and is serving as a special advisor to the CEO of the company, where he has worked since 2006.

    Greg Lewis (contributed photo)

    During his time at Honeywell, he served as a catalyst for digital transformation, launched the company’s Enterprise Information Management Strategy and made significant changes for greater operational excellence. He built a culture with data at the forefront of strategic decision making and provided critical leadership in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the dynamic economic and geopolitical environment during the last five years.

    Lewis earned his bachelor’s degree from the School of Business in 1991, with a major in finance, and four years later earned an MBA from Fordham University.

    Over the last three years, Lewis has been involved with the School of Business,  engaging with faculty and students, and mentoring teams. Lewis is a champion of diversity and inclusion and is the executive sponsor of the All-Abilities Employee Network at Honeywell with over 2,500 associates. He chairs the Charlotte (NC) Small Business Innovation Fund and is a board member for Roof Above, a Charlotte-based organization fighting homelessness. He is also an independent director on the board of Medtronic.

    Lewis’ wife, Barbara, is a 1989 graduate of the School of Business. They have established a scholarship here, providing opportunities based on academic achievement and need.

    Rob Skinner Named a Top Financial Advisor

    Rob Skinner ’93 (CLAS) is a Founder and Managing Partner of IEQ Capital, an independent wealth management advisory firm which integrates investing and intellectual and emotional decisions.

    Robert Skinner (contributed photo)

    Skinner began his career at Fidelity Investments in 1995 and later joined Merrill Lynch as First Vice President of Investments. In 2008, he co-founded Luminous Capital, where he served as Chief Investment Officer, Co-Head of Investment Research, and Co-Manager of Portfolio Construction.  Luminous Capital managed $5.5 billion of assets when it was acquired by First Republic Bank in 2012. At First Republic, Skinner served as Senior Managing Director and Wealth Manager.

    Skinner has been lauded for his expertise, including being named as one of America’s Top Wealth Advisors by Forbes and as one of America’s Top 100 Financial Advisors by Barron’s.

    Skinner earned a bachelor’s degree from UConn in 1993, with a major in political science. He is active in a host of community programs, serving on the board of directors for The First Tee of Monterey County and also the Pebble Beach Company Foundation. He is a trustee of PGA REACH, the charitable arm of the PGA of America, as well as the Naval Postgraduate School Foundation, and serves on multiple investment advisory boards.

    MIL OSI USA News –

  • MIL-OSI: Terecircuits Becomes National Semiconductor Technology Center Member

    Source: GlobeNewswire (MIL-OSI)

    MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., March 04, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Terecircuits Corporation, a venture-backed startup in advanced materials for the semiconductor industry, today announced that it has joined the National Semiconductor Technology Center (NSTC), a public-private consortium established under the CHIPS and Science Act.

    “Terecircuits is proud to be a Member of the National Semiconductor Technology Center as it expands its membership and impact,” says Wayne Rickard, Terecircuits CEO. “We fully support NSTC’s mission to accelerate U.S. led semiconductor research, strengthen domestic manufacturing and build a skilled workforce. With our expertise in the synthesis, characterization and delivery of polymers, encapsulants and thin film coatings for advanced packaging, we look forward to collaborating with fellow Members to drive innovation and global leadership in semiconductor technology.”

    Operated by Natcast, an independent non-profit entity, the mission of the NSTC is to convene Members, now numbering more than 100, from across the U.S. semiconductor value chain, academia and government to advance three shared and strategic goals: strengthen U.S. semiconductor leadership; reduce time from lab-to-fab; and expand the U.S. semiconductor workforce. NSTC Members benefit from access to leading-edge research, state-of-the-art facilities, shared physical and digital assets, dedicated events and collaboration opportunities, and employer-driven workforce development programming.

    “As a deep tech startup, our NSTC Membership gives us access to invaluable resources and collaboration opportunities that would be difficult or impossible to acquire independently,” says Rickard. “By working alongside industry leaders across the U.S. semiconductor ecosystem, we can accelerate the development of advanced material solutions for heterogeneous integration. Membership offers a unique opportunity to tackle critical challenges in high-density, high-performance chip manufacturing while strengthening domestic capabilities.”

    To view a comprehensive list of NSTC Members and learn how to join, visit natcast.org/nstcmembership/members. For more information on opportunities to engage with Terecircuits on NSTC-related efforts, please visit www.terecircuits.com.

    ABOUT TERECIRCUITS CORPORATION

    Terecircuits Corporation is a venture-backed startup, launched by founders with previous startup success, years of experience, and new and inventive materials and processes that increase current semiconductor yield and throughput while reducing cost compared to current technology. These improvements mitigate the low cost of offshore labor, presenting an opportunity for reshoring packaging and assembly. Terecircuits’ technology is ideal for achieving scale with reduced waste, while meeting critical assembly challenges such as heterogeneous assembly, 3D assembly, IoT, SiC die attach, flexible circuits, chiplets, and MicroLED.

    ABOUT THE NSTC AND NATCAST

    Natcast is a purpose-built, non-profit entity designated to operate the National Semiconductor Technology Center (NSTC) by the Department of Commerce. Established by the CHIPS and Science Act of the U.S. government, the NSTC is a public-private consortium dedicated to semiconductor R&D in the U.S. The NSTC convenes industry, academia and government from across the semiconductor ecosystem to address the most challenging barriers to continued technological progress in the domestic semiconductor industry, including the need for a skilled workforce. The NSTC reflects a once-in-a-generation opportunity for the U.S. to drive the pace of innovation, set standards and secure global leadership in semiconductor design and manufacturing. Learn more at natcast.org. 

    Contact:

    Stephanie Quinn
    squinn@kiterocket.com

    A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/b738b325-b1ef-484c-b15e-07dd38da388b

    The MIL Network –

  • MIL-OSI Russia: We invite you to participate in the International Patriotic Competition “Family History. Immortal Memory”

    Translartion. Region: Russians Fedetion –

    Source: State University of Management – Official website of the State –

    Applications for the International Patriotic Competition “Family History. Immortal Memory” are accepted from February 2 to May 9, 2025. The initiative for holding the competition belongs to the State University of Management.

    The competition is a non-commercial cultural project aimed at patriotic, spiritual and moral education of the younger generation. 237 universities subordinate to the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of Russia, as well as educational organizations of the Republic of Belarus, are invited to participate. At the moment, 50 applications have already been accepted.

    The competition is held in two nominations: “Literature” and “Video”. The “Literature” nomination requires the preparation of an essay, story, novella, essay or other literary work, the content of which reflects the family history of the Great Patriotic War. In the “Video” nomination, you will need to create a work lasting from 3 to 7 minutes, the content of which reflects the family history of the Great Patriotic War.

    Students aged 18 to 25, student associations (consisting of no more than five people in the previously indicated age category), young university teachers aged 18 to 35, as well as teachers aged 35 and older may take part in the Competition.

    Applications and competition works are accepted from February 2 to May 9, 2025. Link to fill out the application: https://forms.yandex.ru/u/679e148bf47e73581080ad9a/

    From May 10 to May 31, the jury of the Competition will review the submitted applications to determine the winners – there are only 6 winners in each category, 3 in each nomination. The results will be announced by June 10, 2025.

    The awarding of the winners of the Competition will take place at a ceremonial event on June 24, 2025, where the official closing of the Competition will take place, a video meeting with universities of the new subjects of the Russian Federation with the participation of veterans of the Great Patriotic War and the special military operation, as well as the holding of the Immortal Regiment action.

    The competition was organized by the State University of Management and the Moscow City Branch of the Russian Military Historical Society with the support of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation under the auspices of the activities of the Association of Student Patriotic Clubs “I am proud”.

    Link to the Competition Regulations: https://disk.yandex.ru/i/BU4SbW9bKGVdvw

    Subscribe to the tg channel “Our State University” Announcement date: 03/04/2025

    инициатива проведения которого принадлежит Государственному университету управления….” data-yashareImage=”https://guu.ru/wp-content/uploads/Семейная-история.-Бессмертная-память.jpg” data-yashareLink=”https://guu.ru/%d0%bf%d1%80%d0%b8%d0%b3%d0%bb%d0%b0%d1%88%d0%b0%d0%b5%d0%bc-%d0%ba-%d1%83%d1%87%d0%b0%d1%81%d1%82%d0%b8%d1%8e-%d0%b2-%d0%bc%d0%b5%d0%b6%d0%b4%d1%83%d0%bd%d0%b0%d1%80%d0%be%d0%b4%d0%bd%d0%be%d0%bc/”>

    Please note: This information is raw content directly from the source of the information. It is exactly what the source states and does not reflect the position of MIL-OSI or its clients.

    MIL OSI Russia News –

  • MIL-OSI Russia: Rosneft has developed the first high-resolution geomagnetic model in Russia

    Translartion. Region: Russians Fedetion –

    Source: Rosneft – Rosneft – An important disclaimer is at the bottom of this article.

    Specialists from the Company’s Moscow scientific institute, in collaboration with the Geophysical Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, have created a geomagnetic model* that allows for high-precision control of the well trajectory during drilling.

    The use of innovative development is especially relevant in areas with an abnormal geomagnetic field, where accumulations of rocks distort the Earth’s magnetic field. Without taking into account the distortions, it is impossible to correctly determine the position of the borehole for drilling.

    The model created by scientists allows obtaining geomagnetic data with a detail of 38 km. This is one of the highest resolutions in the world.

    The reliability of the forecast is confirmed by the results of actual instrumental observations at the Priobskoye and Prirazlomnoye fields of Rosneft in Western Siberia. In addition, the criteria for applicability in various territories have been clarified.

    Development of knowledge-intensive potential is one of the key elements of the Rosneft-2030 strategy. The company prioritizes innovation activities, defining technological leadership as a key factor in competitiveness in the oil market.

    *The geomagnetic model is a mathematical description of the Earth’s magnetic field

    Department of Information and Advertising of PJSC NK Rosneft March 4, 2025

    Please note: This information is raw content directly from the source of the information. It is exactly what the source states and does not reflect the position of MIL-OSI or its clients.

    MIL OSI Russia News –

  • MIL-OSI Russia: Scientists have recorded the brightest cosmic gamma-ray burst of all time, GRB 221009A

    Translartion. Region: Russians Fedetion –

    Source: State University Higher School of Economics – State University Higher School of Economics –

    A team of scientists from 17 countries, including physicists from the National Research University Higher School of Economics, analyzed new photometric and spectroscopic data from the brightest gamma-ray burst in the history of observations — GRB 221009A. They were obtained at the Sayan Observatory 1 hour and 15 minutes after its registration. The researchers recorded photons with an energy of 18 teraelectronvolts. Theoretically, such high-energy particles should not reach Earth, but data analysis showed that this is possible. The results call into question theories of gamma-ray absorption and may indicate unknown physical processes. Study published in the journal Astronomy

    Gamma-ray bursts are powerful cosmic explosions that release enormous amounts of energy. They were first detected in the gamma range, which is where they got their name. These bursts occur when massive stars die or neutron stars collide.

    On October 9, 2022, several space gamma-ray observatories recorded an unusually bright flash in the gamma-ray range, which was later classified as gamma-ray burst GRB 221009A – the most powerful in the history of observations. The intensity of the burst was so high that it caused malfunctions in the gamma-ray telescopes of most orbital observatories, including Fermi, INTEGRAL, Konus-Wind. In addition, the gamma-ray flux that fell on Earth caused a strong disturbance in the ionosphere.

    The energy of GRB 221009A’s radiation in just a hundred seconds was equivalent to the radiation of 1 billion Suns over 97 billion years, despite the fact that the Universe is only 13.8 billion years old. Such events happen extremely rarely – once every thousand years. But it was not only the brightness that made GRB 221009A unique. It was located at a distance of 2.4 billion light years, which is relatively close by the standards of the Universe. For comparison: the most distant known burst was recorded at a distance of about 13.2 billion light years. Therefore, the event aroused interest in the scientific community: already in 2022, 7 articles were published, and by now – more than 200.

    Researchers continue to analyze data on GRB 221009A. An international team of scientists from 17 countries, including a team from the National Research University Higher School of Economics, analyzed for the first time the data from photometric and spectroscopic observations obtained at the Sayan Observatory 1 hour and 15 minutes after the gamma-ray burst was registered.

    Photometric and spectroscopic observations are methods for measuring the intensity of electromagnetic radiation in the visible and infrared ranges and its “color composition” (spectrum). The former allows us to determine how bright an object was, and the latter – what chemical elements are present in the emitting object and on the path of the radiation to the observer.

    The scientists say the data points to sustained activity from the central engine, the compact, massive object that generates the gamma-ray burst. They also note that the environment around the blast changed from denser, shaped by stellar winds, to thinner, more interstellar-like.

    Of particular interest to the researchers were the 18-teraelectronvolt (TeV) photons detected by the LHAASO high-altitude observatory from GRB 221009A. Theoretically, such high-energy photons should not be detected due to their interaction with optical photons in the intergalactic medium on their way to the observer, but somehow they still reached Earth. Analysis showed that the detection of 18-TeV photons is unlikely for existing models of the intergalactic background radiation. The detection of such photons from gamma-ray burst sources is still a unique event.

    “Registration of high-energy photons allows us to test fundamental laws of physics, such as, for example, the constancy of the speed of light. However, there is nothing to worry about yet, since the effect of registering such high-energy photons can still be explained by the uncertainty of the model of intergalactic background radiation, and not by a violation of Lorentz invariance – a fundamental principle according to which the speed of light is constant in all reference frames,” comments Sergey Belkin, a postgraduate student. Basic Department of Space Physics of the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences Faculty of Physics HSE.

    Please note: This information is raw content directly from the source of the information. It is exactly what the source states and does not reflect the position of MIL-OSI or its clients.

    MIL OSI Russia News –

  • MIL-OSI USA: Sols 4468-4470: A Wintry Mix of Mars Science

    Source: NASA

    Written by Lucy Lim, Planetary Scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

    Earth planning date: Friday, Feb. 28, 2025
    Curiosity continues to climb roughly southward through the layered sulfate strata toward the “boxwork” features. Although the previous plan’s drive successfully advanced the rover roughly 21 meters southward (about 69 feet), the drive had ended with an awkwardly perched wheel. Because of this, unfortunately it was considered too risky to unstow the arm for contact science in this plan.
    Nevertheless the team made the most of the imaging and LIBS observations available from the rover’s current location. A large Mastcam mosaic was planned on the nearby Texoli butte to capture its sedimentary structures from the rover’s new perspective. Toward the west, the boxwork strata exposed on “Gould Mesa” were observed using the ChemCam long-distance imaging capability, with Mastcam providing color context.
    Several near-field Mastcam mosaics also captured some bedding and diagenetic structure in the nearby blocks as well as some modern aeolian troughs in the finer-grained material around them.
    On the nearby blocks, two representative local blocks (“Gabrelino Trail” and “Sespe Creek”) are to be “zapped” with the ChemCam laser to give us LIBS (laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy) compositional measurements. The original Gabrelino Trail on Earth near the JPL campus is currently closed due to damage from the recent wildfires.
    Meanwhile, the season on Mars (L_s ~ 50, or a solar longitude of about 50 degrees, heading into southern winter) has brought with it the opportunity to observe some recurring atmospheric phenomena: It’s aphelion cloud belt season, as well as Hadley cell transition season, during which a more southerly air mass crosses over Gale Crater. 
    This plan includes an APXS atmospheric observation (no arm movement required!) to measure argon and a ChemCam passive-sky observation to measure O2, which is a small (less than 1%) but measurable component in the Martian atmosphere. Dedicated cloud altitude observations, a phase function sky survey, and zenith and suprahorizon movies have also been included in the plan to characterize the clouds. As usual, the rover also continues to monitor the modern environment with measurements of atmospheric opacity via imaging, temperature, and humidity with REMS, and the local neutron environment with DAN.

    MIL OSI USA News –

  • MIL-OSI USA: Interview with Sean Colgan

    Source: NASA

    I’m really pleased that you agreed to take advantage of this opportunity.  I don’t recall if I have actually met you personally,  but if so, then I apologize for not remembering.

    I don’t think so, although you’ve certainly signed things for me.

    Well, I guess I have because I do remember seeing your name from time to time on various things. You’ve been at Ames a long time and we’ll have you talk about that in a little bit. The focus of these interviews is not specifically on your work. In fact, it was intended to broaden people’s understanding of who you are and what you do when you’re not at work, because we get compartmentalized and mostly get to know people through our work interactions, so we’ll be touching on your other interests. As you’ve seen if you’ve read some of these, we generally start with your childhood. I try to look up bios and things like that ahead of time to see what I can glean before these interviews but you don’t have a very substantial presence on the web.

    I’m not a very public person.

    I did find that out (laughs).

    I did not volunteer for these and I tried to lay low until you hunted me down! (laughs)

    Well, I think you’ll be pleased and as I said, you can stay as private as you want during this whole interview.

    Sounds good.

    We like to start with where you were born, your family at the time, what your parents did, if you have siblings, and then we ask when became aware of or developed an interest in what you have pursued as a career.

    OK, and I’m going to be looking sideways at my notes because I printed out your list of questions and thought about them. Hopefully I won’t mess it up too much. I’m a big believer in the written word. I was born in Oakland, just up the Bay.

    So was I, so we have a connection right there!

    Up through my preteen years I grew up split between Oakland and North Lake Tahoe. My dad was a masonry contractor. When school got out in June we would go up to Tahoe where there was lots of work for him, building foundations for homes and so forth. When Christmas break came in school, we came back down to Oakland. We had a home in both places and dad could get work in the winter in the Bay Area. In the middle of every year during my preteen years, I switched between two schools. It was usually a bit of a jolt because the Oakland schools were ahead of the Tahoe schools, so there were a couple weeks of flailing about in January trying to catch up. They all used the same textbooks, but we were a couple of chapters behind at that point and had to catch up.

    When I was 12, Dad had established his business well enough at Tahoe that my parents sold both of the houses, built a somewhat bigger one, and we moved to Tahoe permanently. So from seventh grade through high school it was all at the northern end of Lake Tahoe.

    I have one sibling, a brother.

    And when did I start thinking about becoming an astronomer? I can’t remember exactly, to be perfectly honest. I do remember my parents showing me the constellations. I can remember specifically which constellations my dad showed me and which ones my mom showed me. I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t interested primarily in being an astronomer, but I probably went through an astronaut phase because it was the ‘60’s!  I got an astronomy book for my birthday one year and I know it was before I could really read and understand it. I remember looking at the pictures. In thinking about this interview, I went back and looked.  That book was published when I was five, so probably by the time I was five I was talking about it enough that I got this book for my birthday. I don’t have any similar books on other topics from that time. All the other books I have from back then are astronomy books for kids.

    Well, you were living in Lake Tahoe, which by the elevation and the clarity and lack of ambient lights around you would have had a really good view of the stars and constellations.

    Right. It was great. Although before we moved up there full time we were mostly there in the summer, so it didn’t get dark until after my bedtime.  When we moved up there full time, then I could go out in the winter and yeah, we had a spectacular view of the southern sky. There were woods but we could see over the trees. We could see the center of the Milky Way, and so forth. I had binoculars and a couple of small telescopes that I’d use, along with a star atlas to point me toward interesting things to look at.

    Did you say what your mother did? Did she work outside the home?

    Mom was a writer.  We traveled each year when we were growing up. She would write travelogues of those trips and try to get them published. She also wrote haiku poetry, and she tried her hand at writing other things. She was published a bit, but not a whole lot. Mom did get one of her travelogues published in the Christian Science Monitor. That was a highlight for her.

    And was your brother older or younger?

    My brother is two years younger, and we had somewhat similar trajectories.  We’ll get to education later but he majored in physics as well. He followed me in similar universities, but ended up going into material sciences. He is now on the East Coast working for IBM.

    That’s great.

    He was named a Master Inventor in 2018.

    A what?

    A Master Inventor. He has over 200 patents, so IBM honored him with this title.

    That’s quite an honor!  Your education was interesting because of the split between the two schools.  But then at some point, when you went to college, you had to declare a major. You said you had already developed an interest in astronomy, so did you pursue that science discipline right off the bat?

    I went to UC Riverside for two years, and then I transferred to Caltech. My freshman year  I really nailed down my choice for astronomy. I remember going to the Career Center and taking an interest survey, which has nothing to do with what you’re able to do. It just asks what you’re interested in doing, and it came up as physicist or musician.  I have no musical skills so that pointed me in the other direction. I thought briefly about geology, since my dad had been a geology major, but I really settled on astronomy at that point, which is why I transferred. Riverside didn’t have an astronomy major,  they only had a physics major. I really wanted to get an astronomy background and start on it early.

    My time at Caltech was probably the toughest two years I’ve ever had. I was behind because I had gone to Riverside for two years and the Caltech student body was extremely competitive. Caltech was not generous with their transfer credits. I ended up taking a very heavy course load, but I did make it out in two years. From there I applied to a number of grad schools. I settled on Cornell for a couple reasons: First of all because they had groups working in the areas  of astronomy I thought I was interested in, which were radio and infrared. Second of all, after four years in southern California I really wanted to go to a more rural setting to continue my education.

    I have to ask this because when we’ve interviewed others who have gone to Cornell, most of them have mentioned the influence of Carl Sagan and I just wondered if that figured into your choice, or was he gone by the time you went there?

    Well, I  did meet Carl, at a second year reception he threw for the grad students.  He was gone most of my first year working on Cosmos the television show. He had taken a leave of absence and wasn’t around. When he came back he threw a reception for all of us, and I got to shake his hand. He was a planetary scientist, of course, and that was not where I was aiming my trajectory.  I didn’t see him a whole lot other than that one reception. Although from time to time the kind of people you really don’t want wandering around the halls would come around the building looking for Carl Sagan. Security would chase them down and get them out. These are really my most distinct memories of Carl.

    And your PhD was in astronomy, not physics?

    It was in astronomy and my dissertation was on radio astronomy. I did it almost exclusively at Arecibo (Arecibo Observatory, National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center, Arecibo, Puerto Rico) with a little bit at the VLA (Very Large Array Radio Telescope facility, near Socorro, New Mexico). I got to work with some really smart people at Cornell, observational and theoretical.

    At this point we usually inquire about the connection or the influence, that brought you from your PhD to NASA Ames.

    My degree was in radio astronomy but the other interest I always had along the way, which I hadn’t been able to look into, was infrared astronomy. Getting post docs is very competitive, back then we called them NRC’s. The NRC offer from Ed Erickson’s group at Ames was the best offer, so I came out for that. It wasn’t a sure thing, there was back and forth and the highest rated candidate had to turn down the job before they would make me an offer.  But fortunately for me the highest rated candidate was my office mate at Cornell. I knew he was going to turn down the offer as soon as he got another one he wanted, so I was aware a little bit in advance of getting the call from Ed that things had worked out.

    And Ed was your advisor?

    Ed was my advisor. So I came and did two years as an NRC and then continued working with the group. I had made myself sufficiently useful that when I was ready to apply for other jobs, Ed offered me a raise if I’d stay with the group and continue working. That was a really good time. We flew on the KAO (Kuiper Airborne Observatory). They didn’t really have facility instruments, so we had our own instrument, but we did support observers from outside our group. We probably had more flights than any other instrument on the KAO during that period. It was a lot of flights. We had to operate it ourselves. All of us had our own particular jobs on flights. We did everything from prepping for the observations, writing proposals, all the way through to seeing them published. We were a small team: Ed Erickson, Mike Haas; Jan Simpson, and Bob Rubin on the science side helped out. We had a shop guy, Gene Beckstrom, and others after him.  We had a lab technician, Jim Baltz. Dave Hollenbach would also work with us, and that was very rewarding. He was a very sharp guy in terms of theory, ideas and projects to do. Here is a photo of some of us with our instrument rack getting ready for a KAO flight:

    So you came in on an NRC postdoctoral fellowship in the mid-‘80’s?

    Yes, I started on October 6th, 1986.

    And your first work was on the KAO and then probably a decade later you continued on SOFIA (Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy)?

    It was ‘95 or ‘96 when they shut down the KAO to use the funding for SOFIA development. I remember the meeting still. It was in the upstairs auditorium and they came in and announced they were shutting the KAO down. I think it was Dave Morrison, who was the division chief, who told us not to whine about shutting it down because planetary missions sometimes had years when they didn’t have their facilities. In this case it was only going to be two years and we would be up and flying in 1997. Of course, as we know, it was more like ten years after that before we were even close to flying.

    Yes, I thought the same thing, that it was not going to be two years. It always takes longer than that.

    Well, I don’t think anybody thought it was going to be as many years as it was.

    But you flew on both the KAO and SOFIA?

    I had ninety nine flights on the Kuiper (KAO) because I kept track of them, and on SOFIA I had two flights, so I was not a flyer on SOFIA. It was more of a facility observatory, and the people who flew a lot were really part of the observatory. They were operating the telescope or operating a science instrument. My flights on SOFIA were because I had written some software for the GREAT Instrument (German Receiver for Astronomy at Terahertz Frequencies, a modular dual-color heterodyne instrument for high-resolution far-infrared spectroscopy) to help them interface with SOFIA. I was along on  those commissioning flights for GREAT in case my software broke. They wanted me on board. Interestingly by the rules at the time, I wouldn’t be allowed to actually fix the software in flight because it was flight software and had to go through all the reviews. None of the people who could do the reviews were on the airplane, but I could see how it broke and maybe I could suggest workarounds. It was not nearly as much fun for me as the KAO. I didn’t really have a job. The software had issues from time to time, but it basically worked. Everybody else had jobs, so for me it was less interesting, which is why I didn’t make a huge effort to keep flying on SOFIA.

    Did you stay on the SOFIA project as a somewhat non flying support person?

    Yes, from when the Kuiper stopped flying until about, well now, my primary work on SOFIA has been first with the project science team during development – trying to make sure they met our requirements, helping everybody understand our requirements, trying to make sure they weren’t making any huge mistakes. They made them anyway, especially when they didn’t listen to us, but we did our best. During the early years of SOFIA, I was also on the Ames team developing AIRES – a facility Science Instrument for SOFIA. I led the software effort, but the development was canceled in 2001. I then got involved with the software that people would use to propose to SOFIA, the proposal software, the software to estimate how long you should be asking for time, the sensitivity of the instruments, pieces of software like that. I worked with Dave Goorvich. We got software from other observatories as starting points and then modified them for SOFIA, software “re-use” they called it. And that was basically my main job throughout SOFIA’s lifetime. Once we developed those, the USRA (Universities Space Research Association) folks built their team around maintaining them and I joined that team because I’d been working on this software for so long. I also got into the package I mentioned to help GREAT interface to SOFIA. It basically made SOFIA look like the telescope that the GREAT team had been using for years, an observatory called KOSMA. We called it the translator and it translated KOSMA commands into SOFIA commands; then SOFIA housekeeping back into KOSMA housekeeping, so they didn’t need to change their software to work with SOFIA. As the aircraft started flying, it became quite clear that I was oversubscribed. I was not meeting my deadlines for either of those two efforts, so I gave up the translator. They hired another fellow to maintain that, although I stayed in touch with it for some years, helping him when he had questions and so forth. I then focused my main effort over on SOFIA’s DCS (Data Cycle System) side.              

    What has been your most interesting work here at Ames?

    I’d say it was flying on the KAO, but very specifically it was Supernova 1987A which occurred after I had been here for only a couple of months. It went off in February of 1987. Nobody really knew what it would look like in the infrared to an instrument on an observatory like the KAO, so it was obviously a huge deal since it was the closest supernova for hundreds of years.  Our team just completely redirected  to carry out observations of the supernova.  Dave Hollenbach and I worked together to try and figure out what we would see. We wrote up the science portion of the proposal,. For these observations, our instrument – the CGS (Cooled-Grating-Spectrometer) – had to be fairly substantially reworked in the sense that the grating needed to be changed to go to lower resolution and the detectors needed to be changed to get wider bandwidth and go to shorter wavelengths. Ed and Mike worked long days, weeks, and months to make all of those changes happen. In our proposal we made some predictions about which lines we could see, mostly iron lines, and which ionization states. We put that in the proposal, which was accepted. We then wrote up the proposal as a separate paper. When we went down and did the observations, we actually got some of it right. Surprisingly, iron was indeed bright. We thought we’d be seeing all different ionized states of iron, from singly, doubly, triply ionized iron, when in fact it was very much concentrated in singly ionized iron with a little bit of doubly ionized iron, there was a faint line there. We had gotten the temperatures right, but we didn’t quite get the ionization right. We were in the ballpark, so I think this was really the most interesting work in that when we started nobody had really seen anything like it before. We were starting from very basic principles, and we followed that all the way through to a nice series of papers. We went down for three different epochs because the lines were changing with time as the supernova ejecta expanded. We obtained three sets of measurements, which resulted in three papers.

    What I’m currently working on? Well, SOFIA is, of course, shut down and I am working as part of the shutdown process. We’re trying to reprocess a lot of the data to bring it up to standard, especially the older data. We learned more about the instruments as time went on, so we can now do a better job of reducing the data. I’m helping out with reducing the data, getting it into the archive as we shut down, and of course, writing proposals.

    What comes next? So far I’ve collaborated mainly with Naseem, whom you have spoken to, Sarah Nickerson, whom you also have spoken to, and Doug Hoffman (whom we’ve also spoken to). So that’s proposals.

    How is your work relevant to Ames and the NASA mission? 

    Well, I’ve worked on NASA missions almost my entire career, so I think that’s the closest to relevance as you can get.

    What is a typical day like for you?

    I mostly work, well before the pandemic in my office, but now it’s back and forth. I do like to come into the office although this week is a little different. That’s why we’re doing this interview from home. My wife is out of town and I like to work at home on those weeks just to keep the dog out of trouble. So I’m at a computer. I’m a software guy and a data analysis guy, not a lab guy, so I work at the computer. I actually have several computers on my desk. I look like a real developer (laughs). If you see my desk, I’ve got a couple of big screens and couple of computers underneath hooked up to different things and I can switch them around. So that’s a typical day, but at home it’s a little tougher. I don’t have a desk that can really manage the big screens, so I’ve just got one little laptop screen to work with.

    Is home close enough that the pandemic shut down of the Center didn’t really save you a whole lot of commute time?

    I live across the Bay in Newark, which physically is not far, but traffic wise is not good. I typically come in later and stay later because that works with my wife’s schedule and also works with the traffic. We’re not so close that it’s easy. I hated during the pandemic having to work at home all the time because of the small screen and with no room to spread out piles of paper or stay organized. That was definitely a challenge. I was very glad to get back on site.

    What do you like most and least about your job?

    Most would be doing science, but I also enjoy coding. Least is probably the standard sorts of things that most people whine about when given any opportunity.  All the stuff that goes with the job that isn’t science or coding, like IT security and paperwork. Right now I’m in the midst of training, taking courses I’ve taken every year for the last ten years, which gets a little old after a while, things like that. But somebody thinks you need to do it, and I hope it makes us a better organization for everybody doing it.

    Do you have a favorite memory from your career? Or perhaps a research finding or breakthrough, or an unexpected research result?

    My favorite memory would be the Supernova 1987A work in general. We found some unexpected things there and we got some things right.

    If you could have a dream job, what would it be?

    My dream job is pretty close to what I have. Pretty close without all the extra stuff.

    What advice would you give to someone who wants a career like yours?

    Of course you’ve got to work hard, and you need to have an aptitude for it. It’s a very competitive field, so you’ve also got to realize that luck, or being in the right place at the right time, can be a factor in whether you continue or not.  I’ve had colleagues who were very good at what they do, but they just weren’t in the right place at the right time. They ended up leaving the field or doing something less than what they hoped. Some things are just out of your control.

    I did get lucky. I was in the right place at the right time. I flew on the Kuiper, and I developed skills. When SOFIA started, those skills were very much in demand.  That was my right place, right time moment, which is when I joined the civil service.  I had been a contractor  after my NRC ended through 1997. I became a civil servant then because there was so much work on SOFIA. I don’t know if that’s  helpful advice, but it’s just my take on things.

    Well, you’re right. There’s something to being in the right place, at the right time and being prepared, but there’s always the serendipity aspect, which is just part of life. You could have wound up somewhere else and been just as happy, you know.

    Oh yes, It doesn’t necessarily relate to happiness, but you’ve got to make the best with what you have.  I do feel lucky about that.

    Would you like to share anything about your family? Kids, pets, activities? You mentioned a dog?

    I’m going to mix the order up a little bit.

    Sure, go ahead.

    The accomplishment I’m most proud of that’s not science related would be 40 years of marriage to my fabulous wife. We just celebrated our 40th anniversary about a week and a half ago.

    Congratulations! That is indeed an accomplishment.

    So, no children but we do have a dog, a little Welsh Corgi. She’s our second corgi and she is just great. We do enjoy traveling. Typically, we’ll go on vacation in August. often to Europe. We’ve visited the UK five or six times, France a couple of times, Italy a couple of times. My father-in-law was born in Hungary, so we’ve gone there a couple times. Here is a photo of us at Lake Louise in 2019, with our Corgi.

    What do we do for fun the rest of the time? Besides leisure travel, I enjoy gardening. We also enjoy musical events.  We have season tickets to the San Jose Opera, for example, and we’ll go up to San Francisco for concerts a couple of times a year. We probably have an event every other month.  During the pandemic, the restaurants and movie theaters were closed, but wineries with outdoor spaces were open.  They started serving food during the pandemic, and they allowed dogs, so we got in the habit of doing a lot of wine tasting on weekends just to get out. We still do some of that. To celebrate our 40th, we went up to Napa and tasted a lot of great wines. (laughs)

    You mentioned that you’re not particularly musical, so you don’t play an instrument or anything, but you enjoy music and opera.

    I enjoy listening to music. I played instruments as a child but had no particular talent for it, so. . . .

    Do you like to read? And if so, any particular genre?

    I read a fair bit, and it’s sort of divided. For entertainment, I’ll read fantasy and science fiction, but when we go on our trips, I’m always buying books about what we’re doing. For example, if we go to France and visit cathedrals, I’ll buy books about how they built cathedrals; or in England I’ll read about old Stone Age tombs. Everybody’s heard about Stonehenge, but there are stone circles and other stacks of stones, big ones, all over the landscape, so I will buy books and read about them. I have books about Roman battle tactics, etc. Oh yes, and I also have a lot of geology books, depending on where we go. When we went to the Canadian Rockies, I got a lot of geology books about that locale. I bring those home, stack them up, and read them, hopefully before the next trip. So yes, a lot of reading. When my wife travels, sometimes I’ll go hiking. She’s gone up to 15-20 weekends a year  She’s a textile artist.She teaches lacemaking, which is the way they used to make lace by hand, before machines. There are groups around the country that enjoy lacemaking, so she travels to  teach workshops for them on weekends.

    Wow, that’s fascinating!

    This week, she’s actually up in Sparks, next to Reno, where the National Convention is going on. It moves around every year, but this year it’s relatively close. She travels a lot for that, which keeps her busy. When she’s away, our dog and I will sometimes go for hikes, if we don’t have too much other stuff to do. Interestingly,  we are not the only astronomer-lacemaker couple in the world (laughs). There’s an Australian couple – Ron and Jay Ekers – with Jay a lacemaker and Ron an astronomer. We had dinner with them once when they were visiting in the Bay Area because our wives knew each other. My wife had once traveled down to teach in Australia. Normally she just travels around the U.S., but she has done some international trips.

    Now, is this manual lacemaking with needles and thread or . . . ?

    There can be needles and thread. That’s one form of it. What my wife teaches is “bobbin lace”, which is made on a pillow usually stuffed with straw. Two bobbins are connected by a thread with many of these pairs used to weave threads together to create the pattern. Photos of Louise’s designs are on her website – https://colganlacestudio.com/. Here’s a photo of what a lace pillow looks like.

    Interesting. And when did she get interested in this? Was it something she learned as a child, from her mother or grandmother?

    No, it was at Cornell. She was in grad school there, which is where we met.

    And what was her course of study?

    She was in a Master’s program for historic preservation, basically how to preserve old buildings, of which there are many in upstate New York and few in the Bay Area. She had finished her class work, and I still had several years to go on my dissertation. She looked around for something to fill her time, and one of her friends – a colleague in her department – had already taken this up, and brought her to a meeting. She started taking classes from a local teacher, and by the time we moved west, she was well-versed. Not many people out here knew how to do it, so she started taking on students.

    So I’m calculating back, since I’m a numbers guy, that if you just celebrated your 40th anniversary, then you must have married her while you were still in grad school?

    Yes, about halfway through grad school, in 1983.

    Interesting. So you’re a little bit responsible for her developing this interest in lacemaking?

    I wouldn’t claim any of that.

    But you’re responsible for giving her the time to develop this interest in lacemaking that she has done so well in.

    It was all her effort. If anything, I made conditions difficult for her, and she found her way out (laughs). That’s probably the way I would phrase it.

    Fair enough. But it’s very interesting. I like when we can poke around a little bit and find out interesting things, because then people who read this will say, “Well, I didn’t know that he went there or that his wife does lacemaking or the other things that you’ve talked about. That’s part of the purpose of these interviews.  Who or what inspires you?

    That was a real easy one for me: the night sky.  It’s not so great in the Bay Area most times, but there’s so much going on up there. I mean, it’s really all laid out for you. Since I studied and read about  a lot about the sky as a kid, I know my way around it. a I also know fun little facts, so that’s entertaining to recall as well. When you get up in the mountains, of course it’s just beautiful.

    I feel the same way. I don’t see how anyone can look up at and ponder the night sky and not be just fascinated by it. The questions that come up about what it is, how it came to be, what its purpose is, if there is one, and all of that is just fascinating.

    Yes, I agree.

    Do you have a favorite image, of space or anything that is particularly meaningful to you?

    You know I don’t have one now. I mean, there are a lot of very nice ones out there. A big favorite I remember as a kid was a photo of H and Chi Persei, which is a double cluster of stars, not globular clusters but open clusters. It’s very colorful, with red stars and white stars and blue stars in the image – and just imagining it so far away, but these particular stars are so close together. I don’t know much about it, but something about it just impressed me. A photo like what I remember is at https://www.astrobin.com/337742/.

    The reason we ask about images is because we like to include them in the post, especially about things you’ve talked about.  You mentioned for example, the Supernova 1987A. If a picture from SOFIA came out of that it would be a great addition to this interview. And then maybe you have a picture of you and the corgi on a hike, or your wife doing lace work, anything like that would be great.

    Well, we’ll work on that.

    [Photo thoughts: The three of us from Lake Louise, link to H & Chi Persei photo on the web, Lace Pillow showing bobbins]

    That would be for when you return it after editing.  By the way the transcript is a living document so you can make changes right on it and that’s how it will go in. It isn’t all that formal, we’re not tracking edits or anything like that. We’ll add your pictures and get to a point where it’s set up as it would be when it gets posted and then we’ll send it to you for a final check.  We’re also several months out in terms of the queue of those that are going to be posted, so it won’t be immediate.

    Good.

    We’ve posted about 50 of these, but we’ve done another 20 that are in various stages of being made ready. We’ve sent them out but haven’t gotten them back yet because everybody’s so busy.  We do have a last question and that is do you have a favorite quote? One that you find meaningful, or witty, or clever, that kind of thing?

    I did think about it. Sometimes you asked the question in the online ones about inspirational quotes and this is definitely not inspirational.

    It doesn’t have to be.

    I was hoping that because you didn’t say it here. My favorite quote is one my mom said a lot when I was growing up. She always attributed it to her father. I actually looked it up on the web, because I would have thought Mark Twain perhaps said it. It doesn’t seem that anybody famous has said it though. The reference is in a book from just ten years ago. The quote is: “The reward for good work is more work.”

    Ah, I like that. That’s clever and witty and seems to be true.

    Right.

    One of my favorite quotes which I don’t think I put into my post because there’s so many of them is from Mike Griffin, former NASA Administrator. He was talking with the press, I think about risk management and why we do things that don’t always work out. He was explaining that there’s always a risk, and if you don’t accept the risk, then you don’t make progress, but they kept questioning him and pushing back on that idea. And he said, “I can explain it to you, but I can’t understand it for you.”  And I thought, that’s a good line!

    Anyway, you ran the table here on the questions and I appreciate that you prepared ahead of time and wrote some notes down, which made the interview go very well.

    As I said, I prefer the written word. I’m not as good at thinking on my feet.

    Is there something that you wish we had asked or had put down as a topic that we didn’t, that you would like to add here? And you can certainly add or change anything when we send this back. There’s a note on the transcript that you have full creative control. So if you wanted to say something but didn’t, you can type in an entire extra paragraph or extra question, or remove and cut out an entire section.

    And  with that, I’ll take the recording and start putting it on a paper and within a couple of weeks, I’ll send you the initial draft and then you can do with it as you wish and send any pictures or anything that relate to things that you talked about and then we’ll get it ready and put it in the queue and eventually you’ll get perhaps a few of your entitled 15 minutes of fame when this goes up. I will add that it goes up on the public side of the of the website so that your family or your friends, anybody can access it and read it.

    So if somebody googles names of interviews you’ve done, the links to the interviews come up.

    Well, I hope that doesn’t cause you heartburn.

    I’ve thought about that as I was phrasing my answers, and changed some passwords so I can include names in the photo captions

    I hadn’t thought of that aspect of it, but you’re probably right.

    Yeah.

    I never know what’s going to touch someone’s concerns.

    Well, just to be careful.

    (Mark) There’s another thing that even after we publish, we can still edit them years into the future. Everything on the main sites can be changed at any given moment. Also, Fred, just to note, our interviews rank pretty high on the Google rankings. Usually when you Google someone’s name and then NASA, our interviews are near the top of their results, like on the first screen that comes up.

    (Fred) Oh, really? I didn’t know that.

    (Mark) Yeah. This is a pretty good series, people check it out a lot.

    Which means that people googling names are clicking on the interviews and reading them.
    (Mark) People read these a lot.

    (Fred) The other series I do for the website is “Interesting Fact of the Month”.  Steve Howell suggested that would be a nice addition as we try to attract traffic to the website, and I heard a year or so ago that it was the top item on the code ST website, it got the most hits.

    (Mark) Yes, you’ve got spots one and two on your side projects!

    (Fred) Well, Sean, I appreciate that you were able to overcome your initial hesitation and take the time to work with us on this and I think you’ll be pleased with how it comes out. Thank you very much for being so organized.

    Thank you for your time.

    Interview conducted by Fred Van Wert and Mark Vorobets on June 29, 2023

    MIL OSI USA News –

  • MIL-OSI USA: University High Knows the Answers at NASA JPL Regional Science Bowl

    Source: NASA

    In a fast-paced competition, students showcased their knowledge across a wide range of science and math topics.
    What is the molecular geometry of sulfur tetrafluoride? Which layer of the Sun is thickest? What is the average of the first 10 prime numbers? If you answered “see-saw,” “radiation zone,” and “12.9,” respectively, then you know a tiny fraction of what high school students must learn to compete successfully in the National Science Bowl.
    On Saturday, March 1, students from University High School in Irvine answered enough of these kind of challenging questions correctly to earn the points to defeat 19 other high school teams, winning a regional Science Bowl competition hosted by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. Troy High, from Fullerton, won second place, while Arcadia High placed third.
    Some 100 students gathered at JPL for the fast-paced event, which drew schools from across Los Angeles, Orange, and San Bernardino counties. Teams are composed of four students and one alternate, with a teacher serving as coach. Two teams at a time face off in a round robin tournament, followed by tie-breaker and double-elimination rounds, then final matches.

    The questions — in biology, chemistry, Earth and space science, energy, mathematics, and physics — are at a college first-year level. Students spend months preparing, studying, quizzing each other, and practicing with “Jeopardy!”-style buzzers.
    It was the third year in a row for a University victory at the JPL-hosted event, and the championship round with Troy was a nail-biter until the very last question. The University team only had one returning student from the previous year’s team, junior Feodor Yevtushenko. Both he and longtime team coach and science teacher David Knight said the key to success is specialization — with each student focusing on particular topic areas.
    “I wake up and grind math before school,” Feodor said. “Being a jack-of-all-trades means you’re a jack-of-no-trades. You need ruthless precision and ruthless speed.”
    University also won for four years in row from 2018 to 2021. The school’s victory this year enables its team to travel to Washington in late April and vie for ultimate dominance alongside other regional event winners in the national finals.
    More than 10,000 students compete in some 115 regional events held across the country. Managed by the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Bowl was created in 1991 to make math and science fun for students, and to encourage them to pursue careers in those fields. It’s one of the largest academic competitions in the United States.
    JPL’s Public Services Office coordinates the regional contest with the help of volunteers from laboratory staff and former Science Bowl participants in the local community. This year marked JPL’s 33rd hosting the event.
    News Media Contact
    Melissa PamerJet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.626-314-4928melissa.pamer@jpl.nasa.gov
    2025-030      

    MIL OSI USA News –