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Solar eclipse worth a look

This area won’t have a catbird seat for Saturday’s partial eclipse, but any glimpse is better than none.

The partial solar eclipse that is expected to be visible in this region Saturday morning won’t be the spectacular view that those living in the path of totality from Oregon to Texas will see. But even a partial solar eclipse is worth paying attention to, a Washington State University observational astronomer said.

“Where you are on Earth really changes what you will expect to see in the sky,” said Christopher M. Carroll, who works in the physics and astronomy department on the Pullman campus.

“If you happen to be at the exact right place on Earth, we call this area on Earth’s map the path of totality because the total area of the sun will be blocked out by the moon.

Carroll explained that a solar eclipse happens because the moon’s distance from the Earth makes it appear to be the same size in the sky as the sun.

“Because of the position of the moon and because the moon is a solid object,” he said, “we can see it more clearly. The sun is a ball of plasma, really hot gas, and doesn’t have such a defined surface. So when you put these things in the sky, the moon we see actually can be about the same size as the sun.

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The Lewiston Tribune

Nobel Prize in physics for probing electrons

Three scientists who experimentally probed the blurry realm of the electron have been awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in physics. The scientists, hailing from the United States, Germany and Sweden, used extraordinarily short pulses of light to track the way electrons move in atoms and create the chemical bonds necessary for the formation of molecules.

The work honored Tuesday comes from a discipline known as attosecond physics, so called because the pulses of light used in the experiments last only an attosecond, a period so brief that scientists say there are as many attoseconds in one second as there have been seconds since the dawn of time roughly 13.8 billion years ago.

Earlier advances in the field allowed scientists to scrutinize the motion of atoms within molecules and gain a better understanding of conductivity, said Susan L. Dexheimer, professor emerita at Washington State University and chair of the American Physical Society division of laser science. Attosecond pulses allow scientists to probe even deeper into the submicroscopic realm, to monitor electrons within atoms.

“Shorter-duration light pulses make possible measurements on faster time scales, acting like a strobe light to ‘freeze’ fast motions,” Dexheimer said Tuesday in an email.

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Washington Post

 

The Supreme Court starts its new term with dismal approval ratings

Public opinion of the court is strongly polarized along partisan lines.

At the time of publication, an average of 38 percent of Americans approved of the job the Supreme Court is doing while 54 percent disapproved, for an average net approval rating of -16 percentage points.

Some of the major cases the court will take up in the next few months include challenges to the Chevron doctrine, a somewhat arcane precedent that would severely restrict the government’s regulatory powers if overturned, and a law restricting access to guns for individuals subject to domestic violence orders. There’s also a lawsuit challenging the funding structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and a case dealing with retaliations against whistleblowers. Another case that hasn’t officially been taken up, but that the court is almost certain to hear, is an appeal of a district court ruling restricting access to the common abortion drug mifepristone. The high court put that ruling on hold temporarily while it considers whether to hear the case.

“I think these are fairly normal cases, and they’re not going to shake public opinion up too much,” particularly among those who already have unfavorable opinions of the court, said Michael Salamone, a political scientist at Washington State University who studies public opinion and the Supreme Court. Unless there are a lot of surprising liberal decisions in the next term that cut against the court’s conservative image, Salamone argued, the needle isn’t likely to move much. Any of these cases could result in surprising coalitions or more backroom deal-making between swing justices. But as long as the court’s rulings remain as ideologically extreme as it’s been the past few years, expect the public’s polarized — and negative — views of the institution to remain.

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ABC News/538

How Elk Hoof Disease Alters the Animal’s System

Elk treponeme-associated hoof disease, previously thought to be limited to deformations in elks’ hooves, appears to create molecular changes throughout the animal’s system, according to epigenetic research from Washington State University.

The findings, published in the journal Scientific Reports, also suggest those changes may be heritable. It remains to be seen though whether this means subsequent generations of elk may be more, or less, prone to catching the devastating disease that severely impairs the elk’s ability to find food and escape predators.

“It’s not just the absence or presence of the infection. It’s affecting the animal’s entire physiology, all the cells,” said senior author Michael Skinner, a WSU biologist. “It shows that there’s a molecular impact by the presence of the disease organisms.”

Epigenetics are stable molecular processes that can influence how genes behave independent of the DNA sequence itself. Changes in an organism’s epigenetics can be caused by nutrition or environmental factors – and as this study shows, by an infectious disease.

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Big Country News
Phys.org

Is Utah a model for disagreeing respectfully?

The nation is in a period of ‘extended conflict, partisan conflict, deep division,’ which one Washington university professor says has been more the norm over the course of our nation’s history.

There’s ample evidence of the nation’s deep divisions.

Nicholas Lovrich.
Lovrich

“This is the situation we find ourselves in: People screaming at one another. People are wondering, ‘How is it that we got to this place?’ We’ve been experiencing a pretty long period of being able to get along, in the moderate middle really calling the shots. When that sort of goes away, then you start worrying about things even as deep down as civil war,” said Washington State University Regents and Emeritus Professor Nicholas P. Lovrich.

Lovrich, a panelist on a University of Utah’s Hinckley Institute of Politics forum titled “To Respectfully Disagree: Civility in Government,” said the nation has gone through long periods of bad conduct in the past.

“We’ve had a duel. We’ve had a caning on the floor of the Senate. We’ve had periods of time when we were so divided in (our) politics that it led to a lot of violence in the streets,” Lovrich said on Wednesday.

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Desert News