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kamagra oral jelly uk next day. Materials provided by US Geological Survey. Note. Content may be edited for style and length.At 15, Autumn Fuernisen is cheap kamagra online canada dying.

She was diagnosed at age 11 with a rare degenerative brain disorder that has no known cure or way to slow it down. Juvenile-onset Huntington’s disease. “There’s lots of things that she used to be able to do just fine,” cheap kamagra online canada said her mom, Londen Tabor, who lives with her daughter in Gillette, Wyoming. Autumn’s speech has become slurred and her cognitive skills slower.

She needs help with many tasks, such as writing, showering and dressing, and while she can walk, her balance is off. Autumn has been turned down for clinical trials because she is too cheap kamagra online canada young. €œIt is so frustrating to me,” Tabor said. €œI would sell my soul to try to get any type [of treatment] to help my daughter.” For patients like Autumn with serious or immediately life-threatening conditions who do not qualify for clinical trials and have exhausted all treatment options, there may be another option.

Seeking approval from the cheap kamagra online canada Food and Drug Administration for expanded access, or compassionate use, of experimental therapies. Definitive numbers are hard to find, but studies from researchers, actions by drugmakers and insights from experts suggest that getting expanded access to unproven therapies for rare diseases is more difficult than for more common illnesses, such as cancer. Even with experimental treatments on the rise, patients with rare diseases frequently face an unwillingness by drug companies to provide them before clinical studies are completed. Developing drugs for these diseases is an especially fragile process because the patient populations are small and often diverse, having different genetics, symptoms and other characteristics, which makes cheap kamagra online canada studying the drugs’ effects difficult.

Drugmakers believe offering a drug before studies are finished could impair its development and jeopardize FDA approval. Companies working on therapies for rare diseases, especially smaller ones, could feel those repercussions acutely, said Lisa Kearns, a researcher in the ethics division of New York University’s medical school and member of the division’s working group on compassionate use and preapproval access. €œThere’s not as much investment in rare diseases, so an [adverse] event could frighten the already limited number cheap kamagra online canada of potential investors.” Drugs that were not made available for compassionate use last year until studies were completed include Evrysdi, for spinal muscular atrophy. Enspryng, for an autoimmune disease of the optic nerve and spinal cord called neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder.

And Viltepso, for certain patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. A spokesperson for Roche, which makes Evrysdi and Enspryng and is working on a treatment for Huntington’s disease, said the decision was tied not to the type cheap kamagra online canada of disease but to company policy. Roche does not set up expanded access programs for any drugs until results are available from a phase 3 clinical trial. (Those phase 3 studies are typically the last testing done before the company seeks drug approval.) Another company’s experimental drug for myasthenia gravis, an autoimmune disease that leads to skeletal muscle weakness, similarly was not available through an expanded access program until research was completed last year, and no programs have started for a therapy being studied in a phase 3 clinical trial for Huntington’s disease and for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a fatal neurodegenerative disease often referred to as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

One slight, but cheap kamagra online canada notable, deviation. Drugmaker Biogen agreed this year to allow certain ALS patients to receive an experimental drug as early as July 15, after the testing was to be completed but before the results are known. Dr. Merit Cudkowicz, a neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, cheap kamagra online canada has helped patients get therapies through expanded access.

Since September 2018, she and colleagues launched 10 programs that seek to match people with ALS therapies being developed by drug companies, but only about 120 patients have received therapies this way. More than 16,000 people in the United Stateswere estimated in 2015 to have ALS and most do not qualify for clinical trials because of the progression of their disease or very strict eligibility requirements. These examples contrast with cheap kamagra online canada some drugs for more common problems. Gleevec, for leukemia, was offered to thousands of patients through expanded access programs before the manufacturer completed the clinical studies that led to FDA approval.

Videx, for HIV/AIDS, and Iressa, for the most common type of lung cancer, were similarly offered to large numbers of patients even as clinical trials were ongoing. Last year, Novartis gave more than 7,000 patients worldwide early access to cancer cheap kamagra online canada drugs. Doctors also report that getting experimental drugs for cancer patients is relatively simple. More than 200 physicians around the country were surveyed, and among those who applied for access, nearly 90% said they had secured drugs still being investigated for patients who were not responding to approved therapies.

California researchers found similar trends in a review of 23 social media campaigns launched by patients between 2005 and 2015 seeking a variety cheap kamagra online canada of experimental treatments. While seven of the 19 patients with cancer received early access to requested drugs, no access was allowed for three patients with rare diseases, although one of those patients was allowed to enroll in a clinical trial. Autumn needs help with many daily tasks, says her mother, Londen Tabor (left). €œIt is so frustrating,” cheap kamagra online canada Tabor said.

€œI would sell my soul to try to get any [treatment] to help my daughter.” (Londen Tabor) Companies base their decisions on whether to provide a therapy through expanded access on a number of factors, said Jess Rabourn, CEO of WideTrial, which helps pharmaceutical companies run compassionate use programs. In general, there should be evidence that patients can tolerate the treatment and an expectation that any benefit outweighs the risk, he said. €œThis idea that you cheap kamagra online canada have to wait until the research is done is baloney,” he said. €œWe’re talking about patients who are going to die if they’re told to wait.” But drugmakers often view it differently, even though evidence suggests that granting early access very rarely disrupts drug approval.

Kearns explained that companies often wait until phase 3, or after, because they can be “relatively” confident of a drug’s safety and effectiveness. €œThey don’t want to harm patients, of course, but they also do not want to threaten the drug’s eventual regulatory approval with an adverse event in [a] very sick patient population.” Melissa Hogan, who consults on clinical trials for rare diseases and is an FDA patient representative, attributes the lack of access to the high cost of therapies and the tightknit nature of cheap kamagra online canada the rare disease community, where patients and their families often set up social media groups and exchange ideas and treatment plans. Companies “know that if one patient gains access, other patients will know” and ask for access, said Hogan, who has a son with mucopolysaccharidosis type II. That could overwhelm small drugmakers with little manufacturing capacity.

These concerns cause “many companies [to] just throw up their hands and take a hard line cheap kamagra online canada of no [expanded access] until they reach approval stage,” said Hogan. The 2018 Right to Try law offers another option for some patients. Unlike expanded access, the law applies only to requests for medicines — not medical devices — and does not require approval from the FDA or an institutional review board, a committee that reviews and monitors people participating in research for their protection. The legislation, cheap kamagra online canada however, doesn’t oblige companies to grant a request.

For Cali Orsulak, expanded access may be her husband’s only option. He was diagnosed with ALS in 2019 at age 43. €œWe did cheap kamagra online canada our best with the skill level we had to search clinical trials all over Canada and the U.S., and then erectile dysfunction treatment hit and it became increasingly difficult,” said Orsulak, explaining that they live in Canada but seek medical care in the United States. €œNow that my husband has progressed, it’s even harder to get into clinical trials.” Christina Bennett.

@https://twitter.com/tinabenn12?. Lang=en Related cheap kamagra online canada Topics Contact Us Submit a Story TipWHEATLAND, Wyo. €” Brandon Graves said erectile dysfunction treatment arrived in Wheatland the way new movies do in this High Plains farming town. Months after hitting the big cities and without much fanfare.

“It kind of trickled in and it never really exploded here,” said Graves, a lifelong resident and mayor of the town of about 3,500, the largest cheap kamagra online canada in Platte County. Many residents say the kamagra that causes erectile dysfunction treatment has felt more like an inconvenience imposed on them by outsiders than a public threat. For instance, utility bills came late because the company that prints them is in a city that was hit hard by erectile dysfunction treatment. And the town is stuck repairing and re-repairing one of its aging trash trucks cheap kamagra online canada because the ordered replacement has been delayed by more than a year because of a erectile dysfunction treatment-induced shortage in microchips.

Then there’s the “Colorado Navy,” the locals’ nickname for the parade of vehicles with boats in tow that cross the state line each summer. Their numbers swelled last year as people searched for lakes and campgrounds open during the kamagra, said Shawna Reichert, executive director of the Platte County Chamber of Commerce. Campers were packed so tightly around Grayrocks Reservoir, cheap kamagra online canada a popular fishing spot outside of town, Reichert said, “it literally looked like a city.” The crowds trashed the place, and a rancher lost several cows. Plastic bags were found in their stomachs.

Shawna Reichert, executive director of the Platte County Chamber of Commerce in Wyoming, said the first sign erectile dysfunction treatment was arriving in the area was people from out of state coming to Wheatland to stock up on food and toilet paper. (Rae Ellen cheap kamagra online canada Bichell / KHN) It’s no surprise many residents are lukewarm to the idea of erectile dysfunction treatments. As of July 6, about 29% of Platte County residents were fully vaccinated, according to the state health department. And Wyoming, a staunchly conservative state, had about 32% of residents fully vaccinated, giving it one of the lowest vaccination rates in the nation.

Perhaps also not surprisingly, the state has one of cheap kamagra online canada the highest new case rates in the nation. What might be surprising is that Wyoming’s neighbor to the south has recently experienced similar case spikes, too. Colorado is a Democratic-leaning state whose population is about 53% fully vaccinated, placing it in the top 15 states in vaccination rates. It also had the 12th-highest cheap kamagra online canada rate of new cases among states as of July 9, ranking a few states lower than Wyoming.

(Lydia Zuraw / KHN) Within Colorado, one of the most vaccinated counties is San Miguel County, which, like Wyoming’s Platte County, has a population of a little over 8,000 people. Both counties entered June with high transmission rates and sustained them for several weeks straight, but their vaccination rates are inverses of each other. Fewer than a third of Platte County residents are cheap kamagra online canada fully vaccinated, while about a third of San Miguel County residents are not. The common thread in both places.

Pockets of unvaccinated residents. Health officials are keeping a close eye on erectile dysfunction treatment hot spots that have emerged in recent weeks tied to low cheap kamagra online canada vaccination rates. €œOne of the things that we’ve been sounding the alarm about is the need for hyper-local data,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist with the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. €œThe state could look fine and you can think, like, ‘No big deal.

We’ve got this.’ But then when you drill down at the county level, you could be seeing a cheap kamagra online canada much different story.” The county level might not even be granular enough to show true risk. Small upticks in cases can be meaningful even in sparsely populated counties — and not just because of the potential for transmission to spill across county or state lines. €œSmall rises in cases in rural areas can have devastating consequences because, chances are, there’s fewer health care resources in those places in order to save lives,” she said. €œThere’s been good studies that show that, partially, the ability of the kamagra to kill people cheap kamagra online canada depends on the bandwidth in the health system to save people.” After months of reporting few cases, Platte County Public Health posted a warning on Facebook in early June that 14 people had tested positive for erectile dysfunction treatment in the same number of days, and 12 ended up in the hospital.

That string of cases bumped Platte County into the “red zone” of high transmission rates. €œPlatte County contact tracing has shown that unvaccinated people are going to work and group gatherings while sick,” the post read. Joan Ivaska, senior director of prevention for Banner Health, which runs a 25-bed cheap kamagra online canada hospital in Wheatland, confirmed that erectile dysfunction treatment patients were admitted throughout June, though she declined to say how many. The hospital has only two adult intensive care beds.

She and other health officials continue to emphasize that better treatment coverage is the only way to get back to normal. In early cheap kamagra online canada June 2021, multiple people with erectile dysfunction treatment were hospitalized at Platte County Memorial Hospital, run by Banner Health, in Wheatland, Wyoming. The 25-bed facility has only two intensive care beds for adults. (Rae Ellen Bichell / KHN) The challenge, said Kim Deti, a spokesperson with the Wyoming health department, isn’t just the politicization of the erectile dysfunction treatments, which has turned many against them, though that is a factor.

It’s also that many people have resumed activities and cheap kamagra online canada believe the kamagra is behind them. €œWe’ve had relatively low levels of erectile dysfunction treatment illnesses in most areas of the state for a while now, which affects threat perception,” Deti said. €œThere are many people working very hard and trying everything they can. Wyoming’s coverage rate is not for lack of effort.” In San Miguel cheap kamagra online canada County, Colorado, people were fired up about getting shots from the outset.

€œInterest has been very, very impassioned since treatments became widely available,” said county spokesperson Lindsey Mills. San Miguel County hit President Joe Biden’s vaccination goal of getting at least one dose into 70% of adult residents weeks before July 4, the deadline the nation as a whole missed. Yet the county was experiencing a surge in erectile dysfunction treatment cases similar to that of its cheap kamagra online canada Wyoming counterpart. More than 460 days after Colorado declared erectile dysfunction treatment a disaster emergency, San Miguel County recorded its first erectile dysfunction treatment death on June 14.

The reason?. It cheap kamagra online canada turns out not everyone was as enthusiastic about the treatments as San Miguel County’s high rates indicated. Numbers provided by the local health department show that on the county’s east side, home to the affluent ski resort community of Telluride, about 80% of eligible residents opted in. On the west side, what residents call the West End, only about half did.

That left the county vulnerable to continued cheap kamagra online canada spread. A road winds through the mountains of Wyoming’s Sybille Canyon, past a smattering of homes, a wildlife research center and an old iron mine, between the city of Laramie and the town of Wheatland. (Rae Ellen Bichell / KHN) That east-west divide in San Miguel County reflects a preexisting cultural divide, according to Mike Bordogna, the county manager. The sparsely populated west side, which stretches to the Utah line, was historically the county breadbasket, growing crops and livestock that fed mining towns like cheap kamagra online canada Telluride, now known for skiing and its film and bluegrass festivals.

A KHN analysis of data provided by San Miguel County shows that, since the beginning of the kamagra, most of the county’s erectile dysfunction treatment cases were on the east side, where most residents live. But in May, the tables turned. While the west side typically recorded less than 10% of the county’s cases over the first year of the kamagra, in May cheap kamagra online canada and June its share suddenly was more than 64%, aided by the arrival of the delta variant. In late May, an unvaccinated woman in her late 70s living in the county’s West End caught the delta variant at a potluck following a funeral and died after a week in the hospital.

Other unvaccinated funeral attendees caught the kamagra, too. “Pretty much everybody that was there that was unvaccinated became sick after the fact cheap kamagra online canada — either tested positive or just became sick and didn’t test,” said Amanda Baltzley, contact tracing supervisor for San Miguel County Department of Public Health. Sheila Grother, an EMT and contact tracer who works with Baltzley and has lived in the West End town of Norwood for more than 30 years, said she’s gotten nowhere trying to persuade people to get vaccinated — even though two vaccinated West End residents who contracted the delta variant around the same time as the woman who died, and were also over 70, recovered. €œI’ve been in people’s homes when they’re at their worst and I’ve been with them on their worst possible days,” she said.

€œI thought at one time that people, you know, trusted my judgment to some degree, and I think cheap kamagra online canada some do, but there are those that just — they’re not going to get the damn treatment.” But county leaders are holding out hope that some will have a change of heart. Bordogna said health officials are working on plans to set up surreptitious vaccination stations at the upcoming county fair and rodeo to make it easy for people to get inoculated without worrying about being spotted. The goal is to create a system in which attendees can, for example, tell a family member or friend they were heading for the bathroom and get a shot instead. €œBy and large, Wheatland is open cheap kamagra online canada for business,” says Brandon Graves, mayor of the Wyoming town.

€œIf people are needing to get out of those epicenters where things are still closed down, come to Wheatland and have a steak. We’ve got some great steakhouses.” (Rae Ellen Bichell / KHN) Back in Wheatland, few people were aware of the hospitalizations that happened in early June. Alice Wichert, who manages the Motel 6 in town, suspects most residents probably cheap kamagra online canada weren’t aware of a spike in cases at all. €œThere wasn’t really anybody here who kind of had a strong fear of it,” she said.

€œWe just pretty much went on with life.” But that wasn’t the case for one temporary motel resident. Angela Brixius is a lab technician from Nebraska working a stint at the local hospital, where, among other things, she processes cheap kamagra online canada erectile dysfunction treatment tests and regularly encounters patients convinced erectile dysfunction treatment is a hoax. €œI worry about people that aren’t vaccinated who are out and about who talk to everybody that they meet about how this is not real,” Brixius said. €œI meet people at the hospital.

€˜I don’t cheap kamagra online canada need a swab. I don’t have erectile dysfunction treatment. It’s not real.’” “People are still dying of erectile dysfunction treatment. It’s still going on, and it should be done,” Brixius said before heading out the door for food and fresh air before cheap kamagra online canada another 3 p.m.-to-midnight shift in the lab.

Rae Ellen Bichell. rbichell@kff.org, @raelnb Related Topics Contact Us Submit a Story TipThe Biden administration will support whatever expansions to Medicare Congress is willing to make, Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said Tuesday. Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill are working on plans both to add benefits to the health program cheap kamagra online canada for seniors and to lower its eligibility age from 65 to 60. But the efforts are mired in competing priorities among different wings of the party as they try to push through a spending plan this year that Republicans have vowed to oppose.

President Joe Biden called for the change in Medicare age eligibility while campaigning in 2020. But asked if the administration has a preference on which Medicare provisions cheap kamagra online canada Congress takes up, Becerra said, “Our preference is to get it done. What’s the ‘it’?. We’ll take everything we can get.” In a wide-ranging sit-down interview for KHN’s “What the Health?.

€ podcast, Becerra also said he will support efforts to bring down drug prices, including allowing importation from such countries as Canada that have lower prices and giving Medicare the ability to negotiate prices cheap kamagra online canada. In addition, he said he’s looking forward to efforts to expand the Affordable Care Act, now that it has been upheld — again — by the Supreme Court last month. As California’s attorney general for the previous four years, Becerra led a coalition of Democratic state officials that defended the 2010 health law in that case from efforts by Republican state officials and the Trump administration to have it declared unconstitutional. €œNow we’re playing offense,” he said cheap kamagra online canada.

€œWe’ve got the ball and we’ve got to march it down the field, and we intend to because there are many Americans who still need good coverage.” Among the top priorities for the ACA, he said, is maintaining the erectile dysfunction treatment relief law’s temporary increases in subsidies for people who purchase coverage on the health law’s marketplaces. Those new subsidies, he said, “have made it possible for countless American families to stay on those affordable health plans.” HHS is ready to engage in the fight over prescription drug prices, according to Becerra. €œThe president has been pretty cheap kamagra online canada explicit,” he said. €œHe is supportive of negotiation of drug prices, so when we get a price for our tens of millions of Medicare recipients and our tens of millions of Medicaid recipients, [we know] that it’s the best price we could have bargained for.” At the same time, Becerra said, Biden “has supported efforts to import the same drug that cost too much here from another country if it costs less, if we can do it safely.” Becerra, who has been on the job since late March, said his top priority as secretary is to work on health equity issues.

€œI love that President Biden has said he wants everyone to feel treated equally,” he said. €œThere are a whole bunch of Black and brown communities that have never had the kind of access to care cheap kamagra online canada that others have. And when they come to the doctor, they come with the kind of conditions that show they didn’t have health care before.” Within that broader priority, Becerra said he wants to pay particular attention to the Indian Health Service. €œIt’s time we really focus on our tribal communities and let Indian Country know we really are serious about being good partners.” Another priority is maternal mortality, given in the U.S.

€œthere are women dying in childbirth at greater numbers than in developing countries,” he said, and African American mothers die “in some cases at three or four times the rate of white mothers.” Still high on Becerra’s to-do list is battling erectile dysfunction treatment and, particularly, treatment hesitancy in states where cheap kamagra online canada new variants are spreading fast. Of the people who are dying, he said, “more than 99% are unvaccinated. I don’t know how you can spin that any other way than to say. If you’re vaccinated, cheap kamagra online canada you’re probably going to live.

And if you’re unvaccinated, you’ve done yourself and a lot of other folks a disservice.” But Becerra, who drew criticism from conservatives last week after saying “it is absolutely the government’s business” to know who has been vaccinated, continued to shrug off the idea of any sort of federal treatment registry. The secretary has said those comments were taken out of context and on Tuesday added, “We want to work with our state and local partners.” To hear the conversation or see a transcript, go to KHN’s “What the Health?. € podcast cheap kamagra online canada. Julie Rovner.

jrovner@kff.org, @jrovner Related Topics Contact Us Submit a Story TipCan’t see the audio player?. Click here cheap kamagra online canada to listen on SoundCloud. You can also listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Pocket Casts or wherever you listen to podcasts. The Biden administration stands ready to work with Congress to address drug prices and expand Medicare, Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a wide-ranging interview with “What the Health?.

€ on Tuesday cheap kamagra online canada. The former California attorney general also said his top priority while in office is to attack health disparities. €œThere are a whole bunch of Black and brown communities that have never had the kind of access to care that others have,” he said. €œAnd when they come to the doctor, they come with the kind of conditions that show they didn’t have health care before.” Becerra, who before coming to Washington successfully led a coalition of Democratic attorneys general in defending the Affordable Care Act from efforts to have it declared cheap kamagra online canada unconstitutional, said as secretary he’s looking forward to further expanding the 2010 health law.

€œNow we’re playing offense,” he said. €œWe’ve got the ball and we’ve got to march it down the field, and we intend to because there are many Americans who still need good coverage.” Here is a full transcript of the conversation. Editor’s Note cheap kamagra online canada. If you are able, we encourage you to listen to the audio of KHN’s “What the Health.” This transcript was generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers and may contain errors.

Please use the transcript as a tool but check the corresponding audio before quoting the podcast. Rovner. Hello and welcome back to KHN’s “What the Health?. € I’m Julie Rovner, chief Washington correspondent for Kaiser Health News.

Usually I’m joined by some of the best and smartest health reporters in Washington. But today we have a special guest, Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra. We taped this interview at 10:30 a.m. [ET] on Tuesday, July 13th.

As always, news happens fast, and things might have changed by the time you hear this. So without further ado, here’s my interview with the secretary. Rovner. We are pleased to welcome to the podcast the 25th secretary of Health and Human Services, Xavier Becerra.

Secretary Becerra, thanks for joining us and for having us in the studio here at HHS. Becerra. Julie, great to be with you. Rovner.

Actually, this is a welcome back to the podcast because you joined us a couple of years ago in your previous role as attorney general of California, where you led the court fight to preserve the Affordable Care Act when the Trump administration would not. So let us start there. What’s the status of the ACA right now?. Becerra.

It’s a great place to start because we’re launching. President Biden said when he was a candidate that he wanted to build on the Affordable Care Act. I was fortunate to get to lead the fight to defend the Affordable Care Act. We had a prevailing goal line stance against the attacks.

And so now we’re playing offense, and we’ve got the ball. We’ve got to march down the field, and we intend to because there are many Americans who still need good coverage. So far, the president, through his special enrollment period that he announced, has been able to get more than a million, some 1.2 million, more Americans into coverage. More than a million Americans are finding that they are now paying less for the plans that they had as well, because a lot of folks went back into the website and found that they could get a better plan for less money.

And so we’re going to continue to build on that and we’re going to go after that last crunch of America that is not yet insured. Rovner. How are you going to do that?. I know one of the big priorities is to fill in that gap for the people who don’t have Medicaid in the states that didn’t expand but aren’t eligible for help on the Affordable Care Act exchanges.

Becerra. Right. Well, you mentioned one really important way. And that’s a no-brainer because there are millions of Americans who could qualify for very good, very decent care.

All the state has to do is take up the federal government’s offer to expand Medicaid to those populations. You’re talking 11 states now that haven’t done it. Well, actually 10, because [in] one state actually the people in the state voted for it. But now the legislature hasn’t yet adopted the Medicaid expansion.

That’s right. So four out of every five states [have] already done this for their people and they’ve expanded health care to a lot of those citizens. The second way we want to do this is a very simple way. For example, maintaining the tax credits that the president passed in his American Rescue Plan that make it possible for sort of the working middle-class family that wants to buy insurance but doesn’t get the help that a lower-income American does through Medicaid and finds it really tough to continue a policy even under the Affordable Care Act.

The subsidies that the president expanded and extended in the American Rescue Plan have made it possible for countless American families to stay on those affordable health care plans. And if we can do that, wow, we’re really getting close to chopping away at the final segment of uninsured America. Rovner. I know on Capitol Hill, though, they’re talking about trying to have maybe a federal-only plan to get those people in that gap for those states that haven’t expanded.

That’s something the administration is going to work for?. Becerra. The solutions, they’re coming hot and heavy and we’re willing to look at all of the above. We want Americans to know they’re getting better coverage at a better price for all Americans.

Rovner. So I’m not sure that a lot of people realize the breadth of what the Department of Health and Human Services oversees and the federal government, not just Medicare and Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, but also the NIH and the FDA and the CDC and programs for seniors and children and refugees and health workforce training. Do you have two or three top priorities, things that you really want to leave your mark on as secretary?. Becerra.

Wow!. Well, as you just mentioned, it’s a huge agency. In fact, I like to tell folks — I mentioned it when I first was nominated, but I got to underscore it now that I’m actually here as secretary — just how mighty the second H in HHS is, the human, the human services side. People always forget, you know.

Everyone remembers HHS — oh, health care, Affordable Care Act, Medicaid, Medicare. Human Services is big, especially after erectile dysfunction treatment, the stress that Americans are under, our children, the suicidal ideation that we’re seeing, the high numbers of opioid deaths, probably higher than ever before. Last year, some 90,000 Americans probably OD’d based on opioids last year. We’d never seen those kinds of numbers.

All of that, child care, data privacy in health care, that’s us. All those things are part of the second H in HHS. And in terms of priorities, I love that President Biden has said that he wants everyone to feel treated equally and so attacking disparities, the pockets of America that too often have been left behind. And that’s very personal for me.

There are a whole bunch of Black and brown communities that have never had the kind of access to care that others have. And, by the way, when they come to the doctor, they present with the kind of conditions that show that they didn’t have health care before. All those things that we can address just by making health care more equitable are going to help all America and our economy be healthier. That’s a big one.

I’ll give you little ones. Indian health care services. It’s time we really put a focus on tribal communities and let Indian Country know we really are serious about being good partners, helping make sure that there’s health awareness in Indian Country. And I’ll mention one other because both my wife would kill me if I didn’t mention it and because it’s so severe.

But in America, there are still women who die at childbirth in greater numbers than in developing countries. And that’s really affecting our Black community. African American mothers are dying at disproportionate rates, in some cases three or four times that of white mothers. And so a little thing like that is a big thing for that child that’s born without a mom.

And so if we can do little things like that well, and then if we can continue to build on the Affordable Care Act, if we can finally get reasonable prescription drug prices and the president really wants to push on that, I’m going to be a happy camper. Rovner. I’m getting to that. But first, as you may know, we at KHN have been tracking efforts to undo Trump administration policies here at HHS.

I know the process has gotten started with efforts to end Medicaid work requirements and a lot of policies related to the Affordable Care Act. But there are a lot of other issues, including the Trump administration’s actions intended to reduce access not just to abortion, but to birth control, both under the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid and Title X. I know that was a priority for you as attorney general of California. How big a priority is it here at HHS to start to go after some of those policies?.

Becerra. Huge. That word was overused a few years ago, but huge. And that’s because you can’t fulfill the president’s promise of better health at a better price for more people unless you really protect those types of services that some of our populations need and deserve.

And so we’re going to go after any proposal or any program that undermines better health, better price, more people. And that’s sort of our mantra, is “What can we do to give you access to better-quality health care at a better price?. € And for everyone, more people, we still have about 10% of the population that doesn’t have health insurance coverage and they use the emergency room as their point of entry. Where you and I would go to our family care physician, a primary care physician, others wouldn’t.

And as I mentioned, something like maternal health, something very basic that everyone is for. And my wife as an OB-GYN, as I said before, she’d kill me if I didn’t have a focus on maternal health. It’s critical that we do those things because there are populations — we don’t think about it — but there are populations that are suffering from lack of that type of service. Rovner.

So, obviously, erectile dysfunction treatment is still job one for this administration. We’re seeing the same sort of politicization about the treatment this summer that we saw about masks last summer. We’re also seeing a spike in cases due to the spread of the delta variant. I know the administration has shied away from things like treatment passports, but at some point, aren’t we going to need a universal way to know who’s vaccinated and who isn’t?.

Becerra. We need a way to get America protected and America moving forward and open. President Biden has been very firm about that. We’re going to do what works best for America.

This isn’t a cookie cutter-style approach where, if it worked in Europe or in Asia or somewhere else, we’re going to do it here. We’re going to do what works best for America. And what he is doing in a country with 50 states and several territories and a whole bunch of counties and thousands of cities is we want to work with our local and state partners. And so how we do this will be based on our partnerships with our state and local partners.

And what the president has said is, we’re going to be your partner. We’re going to be right there with you. We’re not going to just say, “Here — we’re delivering the treatments. Go to it.

Bye.” No. €œHere are the treatments. How can we continue to help?. € And that’s why we’re going to do outreach all the way to people’s door if we can get there, because we want you to know when we get a trusted volunteer from your community knocking, saying, “Please go get vaccinated,” we’re supporting that effort by that trusted volunteer.

Whether it’s the pastor, whether it’s the teacher, whether it’s the wrestling coach, we want you to know and we want them to know that we are going to be helping to make sure we protect you and erectile dysfunction treatment doesn’t discriminate. So we’re going to go out there and help everyone. Rovner. What do you do about politicians, including some governors, who are actually actively discouraging people from getting vaccinated?.

Becerra. Look, 99% of Americans today who are dying — and hundreds are dying every day from erectile dysfunction treatment — 99% of them, more than 99% of them, are unvaccinated. I don’t know how you can spin that any other way than to say that if you’re vaccinated, you’re probably going to live. And if you’re unvaccinated, you’ve done yourself and a lot of folks a disservice.

We’re just going to go out there and work. We hope that everyone considers this an effort for Team America. And keeping our fellow citizens safe is a job for Team America. We’re part of that team.

You want to help?. We hope everyone will be part of that team. Rovner. Is there going to be some sort of after-action review of what happened at HHS during the kamagra?.

I’m talking about things during the Trump administration. Obviously, many things could have gone better. Becerra. I do a review virtually every day.

I get briefed on erectile dysfunction treatment, essentially every day. I have a meeting with our white coats, our experts on this, every week. And so we’re constantly doing that. Rovner.

But I’m talking about what happened, particularly at CDC and FDA, where things did not go well, as has been sort of documented. Becerra. There’s always a need to make sure you’re learning from your past. And we’re certainly not going to be those who make the same mistakes in history.

And so we are going to continue to learn. But I got to tell you that what this team has delivered for America — the treatment, the more than 300 million shots in arms — it’s amazing. And we’re going to continue to improve because we know this isn’t the last kamagra America will face. Rovner.

So, drug prices, as you mentioned, are obviously a big political issue. But the president hasn’t proposed any specific drug price proposals of his own. He’s actually passed the task off to the Department of Health and Human Services. Can you give us a preview of what to expect to be in that comprehensive package that he’s asked you for?.

Becerra. Actually, the president’s been pretty explicit. He is supportive of negotiation of drug prices so that when we get a price for our tens of millions of Medicare recipients and our tens of millions of Medicaid recipients, that it’s the best price we could have bargained for. So he’s for that.

He has supported efforts to import the same drug that cost too much here from another country that costs less, if we can do it safely. He has supported every effort possible to try to get us to get a fair price for prescription medication. But what he has said, to your point, is “Congress, we need your help. We need statutory authority to do this.

And so how you decide to do it, we’re going to be supportive, but do it.” And so he’s clear. Let’s do what we can to lower prescription drug prices. But he doesn’t have a vote in Congress. He has some sway.

He’s going to use his authority as the leader of the country and as the man who carries a pen and signs things to try to get us there. Rovner. Well, as you mentioned, I mean, there is some authority on importation if it can be declared safe. But obviously Canada, and even Canada and Europe, don’t have enough drugs to supply the United States.

Is that a real viable solution?. And are you really going to pursue it actively?. Becerra. It is a solution and we have to do it right.

There are different lawsuits that have been filed on efforts to do some of these things. So it is critical. And, by the way, as someone who filed a whole bunch of lawsuits when I was attorney general, I understand how important it is to do it right. Rovner.

So, I want to turn to Medicare. As I’m sure you know, the Medicare hospital insurance trust fund is nearing insolvency, although how near it is we’re not sure because we haven’t seen a Medicare trustee report this year. You’re one of those trustees. Any idea when we will find out?.

And how serious a problem is this impending insolvency for the Biden administration?. Becerra. And, Julie, just as we’re looking at each other, I’ve got to just tell you how cool it is to be a trustee for Medicare, having served in Congress for over 20 years, where we would always talk to the trustees about their report. Now I’m one of those trustees, so it’s, you know, it’s, well, you get tickled a little bit when you think about it.

But it’s serious stuff. And so we have made it clear to Congress, we’re ready with some plans. We want to work with Congress because the heavy lifting really has to be done by Congress. But take, for example, the president’s budget.

In his budget he introduces some proposals that would actually extend the life of the Medicare trust fund. And so we’re prepared to address solvency issues. Remember that [insolvency] doesn’t mean bankruptcy. [Insolvency] simply means that we’ll only have the money that comes in on an annual basis to provide services.

What we don’t want is to have to reduce any services because Americans paid for their Medicare, and it’s been the lifeline for so many seniors. And so we want to continue it at the high standard and, quite honestly, improve it. And so President Biden has made it very clear, he’ll engage, he’s ready. He has no problem arm-wrestling anyone on Medicare and keeping it vibrant.

So we’re ready. Rovner. And when will we see that trustees report?. Becerra.

Oh, I think you’ll see it pretty soon. I’m not the only trustee, so I don’t want to speak for all my fellow trustees, but it’ll come. Rovner. On Capitol Hill there’s also a growing push to add both new benefits to Medicare, like hearing, vision and dental coverage, as well as to lower the eligibility age from 65 to 60, which was something the president advocated for on the campaign trail.

Does the administration have a preference for one or the other of these proposals, or are you going to push for both?. Becerra. Our preferences to get it done?. So, it’s a yes answer.

Yes. And again, because we don’t have the vote, we can only hope that Congress works hard and gets it done. What’s the “it”?. Well, we’ll take everything if we can get it all, but we’ll take something for sure.

And Americans really need, have to have something. Whether it’s the hearing, dental and vision benefits included for a lot of seniors who don’t get that or whether it’s reducing the age for eligibility to Medicare from 65 to 60. There are any number of good ideas. By the way, some of them actually can save you some money.

And so we hope that Congress is listening. Rovner. So, Medicare Advantage, as you know, has grown explosively over the past decade or two. Now, more than 40% of the total Medicare population is in some sort of managed-care plan.

Many experts expect that number to keep going up. Yet numerous government reports and whistleblower lawsuits, including at least two major cases at the Justice Department, have accused plans of overcharging Medicare by claiming their patients are sicker than they are. Do you think the federal government needs to crack down on these overpayments or seek changes to the risk adjustment payment system that was created by Congress?. I think you were there when it was created.

It’s often cited for triggering these overcharges. Becerra. So, Julie, you’re asking all the right questions because you’re asking questions that, again, now I feel tickled that I get to do these. Before I was in Congress asking those questions that you’ve just asked, looking for results.

Now, I’m actually the person who’s in charge of making sure our team does the right thing. And so what I can tell you is this. We’re going to look closely at all the programs because you can’t give better health at a better price for more people unless you’re getting the best bang for your dollar. And so we’re going to make sure that everyone who gets a taxpayer Medicare dollar is doing the right thing with the program.

And because there are a whole lot of seniors who depend on it. So, we’re going to continue to do the oversight. We’re going to continue to ask questions. We’re going to look at the data and then we’ll act.

But I will tell you this. Having served in Congress for more than 20 years trying to beat this one so we get to open the door to those hidden secrets, we’re going to do what we need to do to make sure that Americans are getting the best health care out of Medicare. Regardless of what the format is, we’re going to make sure that Americans are getting their dollar’s worth for their coverage. Rovner.

Are you going to let us see it, too?. As you know, Kaiser Health News has filed a Freedom of Information lawsuit to be able to see the results of the risk adjustment data validation audits, which is how the government decides whether these companies are actually overcharging or not. Are we going to get to see those finally?. Becerra.

Well, you know, I’ve said that at HHS one of our mantras is — I mentioned already — the equity issue, but transparency and accountability. And so transparency is big for us. But as you know, and as I mentioned before, we’ve got to make sure we’re following the rules, because if we don’t follow rules, someone’s going to sue us. And so with regard to that issue, we’re going to be transparent.

But we’ve got to make sure in the process of putting information out there we do it the right way. It’s the right information, the right data, and we do it the right way. Because otherwise, as you know from the litigation that’s already been filed, we’ll find ourselves in court. Rovner.

From the other side. Becerra. From the other side. Rovner.

Last question. One of the biggest controversies right now is over this Alzheimer’s drug, Aduhelm, which was approved by the FDA over the objections of its advisory committees. Now, Medicare has announced they’re going to do a national coverage determination to decide who should get it and whether Medicare should pay for it. Obviously, many Alzheimer’s patients are on Medicare because it tends to afflict people who are older.

How hard is that sort of a tightrope for HHS to walk on, giving people potentially false hope or potentially a life-saving drug or a life-helping drug. Becerra. Here’s the thing I mentioned. Equity, transparency, accountability.

Three of the pillars of what we hope to do at HHS while I’m here.

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Environmental Protection Agency regulatory standards, is associated with higher erectile dysfunction treatment morbidity and mortality amongst hospitalized patients,” said corresponding author Alison Lee, MD, MS, Assistant Professor of Medicine (Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine), and Pediatrics, at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. €œCritically, air pollution is a cheap kamagra online canada modifiable risk factor. Policies to reduce air pollution must be considered a necessary public health measure, especially in communities that are disproportionately susceptible to air pollution’s deleterious effects.” A team of researchers conducted link a retrospective analysis of more than 6,500 erectile dysfunction treatment patients admitted to seven New York City hospitals with ethnically diverse patient populations—including Mount Sinai Morningside, Mount Sinai Queens, NYC Health + Hospitals/Elmhurst, and NYC Health + Hospitals/Queens—amid the first peak of the kamagra from March to August 2020. The researchers estimated exposure levels to pollutants including particulate matter, nitrogen dioxide, and black carbon cheap kamagra online canada at the residential addresses of the patients at the time of admission.

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It was supported by grants from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (R01MD013310), the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (P30ES023515, P30ES009089), the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (P2CHD058486), and the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (K23HL135349)..

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I learned through my research that in addition kamagra reviews forum to being interesting in their own right, brown dwarfs serve as an important bridge to our understanding of both planets and stars, with temperatures and masses intermediate between the two. Now I and other brown dwarf astronomers are enjoying a sweet spot for research—there are still many brown dwarfs waiting to be discovered, and we can build on the wealth of previous research to uncover new details of physical processes at work on these objects. We finally have the technological tools to study the atmospheres of brown dwarfs, for example, as well as their wind and rotation speeds, and to try to determine whether they might even host planets of their own.

In-Between Objects Most stars are powered by the fusion of hydrogen into helium, a wonderfully stable process that keeps stars burning at the same temperature and brightness kamagra reviews forum for billions of years. But if a would-be star never reaches high-enough temperatures or pressures to sustain hydrogen fusion, it is a brown dwarf, with a maximum mass of 8 percent of our sun’s, or about 80 times the mass of Jupiter. Recent studies indicate that brown dwarfs are nearly as common as stars, and they are everywhere.

Brown dwarfs have been found in stellar nurseries kamagra reviews forum alongside young protostars. They have been found in binary systems paired with white dwarfs, having survived potential engulfment by the white dwarf’s previous red giant form. (Our sun, a yellow dwarf star, will one day turn into a bloated red giant, and after it dies, it will become a white dwarf.) Some of the closest stellar systems to our sun are brown dwarfs—the third and fourth nearest extrasolar systems, at 6.5 and 7.3 light-years, respectively (the closest are Alpha Centauri and Barnard’s star).

And yet, despite their ubiquity, most people have never heard kamagra reviews forum of brown dwarfs. Although they lack hydrogen fusion, brown dwarfs do emit light—thermal radiation from the heat within them. They start out relatively hot (around 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit), and over the subsequent billions of years, they cool and dim.

Brown dwarfs kamagra reviews forum never die. They spend eternity cooling off and fading away. The coldest known brown dwarf checks in at a temperature below the freezing point of water.

Because they are so cool, most of the light they emit is at kamagra reviews forum infrared wavelengths. They are far too faint for the unaided human eye to see in our night sky, but if we could look at them up close, they would probably have a dull orange-red or magenta hue. In the more than two decades since astronomers began studying brown dwarfs, we have formed a fairly clear picture of their basic characteristics.

Like our kamagra reviews forum sun, brown dwarfs are composed almost entirely of hydrogen. The temperatures in their upper atmospheres are cool enough, however, that a variety of molecules can form. Signatures of water vapor are seen in nearly all brown dwarfs.

As they cool further, their atmospheric chemistry changes, and different kamagra reviews forum molecules and clouds become predominant. The evolution of a brown dwarf’s atmosphere depends on its mass and age. Imagine a brown dwarf with a mass 40 times that of Jupiter, for instance.

For the first 100 million years, it will have an atmospheric composition similar to that of a red dwarf star, with titanium oxide and carbon monoxide kamagra reviews forum present in the mix. Between 100 million and 500 million years, the atmosphere will cool, and dusty clouds made of minerals such as enstatite and quartz will form. Roughly a billion years after that, the clouds will break up and sink, and methane will become the dominant molecular species in the upper atmosphere.

The coolest known kamagra reviews forum brown dwarf shows evidence of water-ice clouds, as well as water vapor and methane. We expect its atmosphere to contain significant amounts of ammonia, similar to what we see on Jupiter. Beyond these properties, however, there are many things about brown dwarfs that we do not yet know.

The mysterious kamagra reviews forum nature of these objects has inspired some far-fetched ideas. Brown dwarfs were once considered to be a possible reservoir of dark matter, although this idea was quickly abandoned when it became clear that brown dwarfs emit light (that is, they are not dark) and that their contribution to the total mass of our galaxy is small. More recently, scientists proposed that life could form in the cool upper regions of brown dwarfs’ atmospheres—an idea that brown dwarf experts quickly squashed because the dynamics are such that any life-form would cycle into deeper layers of the atmosphere that are hot and inhospitable.

And then there was the hoax of the Nibiru cataclysm, a prophesy kamagra reviews forum put forward in 1995 that predicted an imminent, disastrous encounter between Earth and a brown dwarf. Astronomers would be very excited to see a brown dwarf up close, but there is no scientific evidence to support this doomsday scenario, and a brown dwarf would be visible for hundreds or thousands of years prior to any close encounter. The First Brown Dwarfs Scientists predicted brown dwarfs in the 1960s based on what they knew about how stars and planets form.

It seemed kamagra reviews forum that this intermediate category should exist, but astronomers were not finding any such objects in the sky. It turned out that brown dwarfs are simply very, very faint, and most of the light they emit is infrared. And infrared technology was still in its infancy—just not up to the task.

Then came the kamagra reviews forum year 1995, a big one for astronomy. Astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz found 51 Pegasi b, the first exoplanet known to be orbiting a regular star. Perhaps more important, at least to this highly biased author, the first brown dwarfs were discovered.

Teide 1 was identified in the famous Pleiades star cluster kamagra reviews forum. Astronomers Rafael Rebolo López, María Rosa Zapatero-Osorio and Eduardo L. Martín first spotted it in optical images from the 0.80-meter telescope at the Teide Observatory in the Canary Islands.

The object was young, still glowing kamagra reviews forum slightly from its formation. The team observed the signatures of several molecules in its atmosphere, including lithium. Stars usually burn up lithium as soon as they form, so this amazing detection proved that nuclear fusion was not occurring.

They published their finding in September 1995 kamagra reviews forum. Credit. Illustration by Ron Miller (objects and atmospheres) and Jen Christiansen (H-R diagram) Two months later astronomers announced the discovery of a second brown dwarf, Gliese 229B, a companion to another star.

A group kamagra reviews forum of astronomers at the California Institute of Technology and Johns Hopkins University first saw the object in an infrared image from the Palomar Observatory. They immediately knew that it was strange. It had unusual colors and displayed the signature of methane in its atmosphere.

Conditions must be very cold for methane to be present because the highly reactive molecule kamagra reviews forum usually turns into carbon monoxide at higher temperatures. Later observations revealed that the brown dwarf is about the same width as Jupiter, with a diameter of nearly 129,000 kilometers, but much denser, with 70 times as much mass. By the time I started graduate school in 2000, we knew of more brown dwarfs, though not that many.

I was focused on building infrared instruments, and I needed a subject kamagra reviews forum for my research topic. My Ph.D. Adviser studied star formation, so I decided to search for brown dwarfs in star-forming regions.

I ended up discovering a good number kamagra reviews forum of brown dwarfs in my thesis work, including some that were the first known to have masses putting them near the range of planets. At the time we had no idea how these things formed, and we did not know whether there was a lower-mass threshold, but we started finding smaller and smaller objects. All in all, my thesis work published fewer than 20 new brown dwarf discoveries, but they made a significant contribution to the total number known.

Since then, new instruments kamagra reviews forum have found many, many more. The main contributors were the 2 Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS), an infrared survey conducted in the early 2000s, and the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), a space telescope launched in 2009. The current tally of brown dwarfs is about 3,000.

There are many more to be found, though—estimates suggest that the kamagra reviews forum Milky Way contains between 25 billion and 100 billion brown dwarfs. Formation Scenarios As the lowest-mass outcome of the star-formation process, brown dwarfs offer astronomers a unique chance to deepen our understanding of the basic steps involved in the birth of stars and planets. Stars form in complexes of gas (mostly molecular hydrogen) and dust known as molecular clouds.

If a kamagra reviews forum molecular cloud contains enough mass, gravity can overcome the gas pressure supporting the cloud and cause it to collapse into a star. During the collapse, any small amount of rotation in the cloud becomes amplified, much like how ice skaters spin faster when they pull their arms in. This rotation of the cloud material leads to the formation of a circumstellar disk of matter surrounding the nascent star, which then becomes a crucible for planet formation.

When brown dwarfs were first discovered, astronomers assumed they might form in a process similar kamagra reviews forum to that for stars, but they were perplexed as to how the gravity from such a small mass was able to overcome gas pressure and initiate a collapse. In writing this article, I looked back over some grant and telescope proposals from early in my career, most of which were aimed at better understanding the formation mechanism of brown dwarfs. At the time there were several competing ideas.

Some theories involved kamagra reviews forum disrupting the formation of a star before it had reached its final mass. Perhaps some process physically removed the brown dwarf or burned off its natal environment, leaving behind a miniature star?. Other hypotheses invoked a scaled-down version of star formation or a scaled-up version of planet formation.

This is a lovely kamagra reviews forum example of using a variety of possible theories to make distinct, testable predictions. As we discovered the ubiquity of circumstellar disks around brown dwarfs, determined the distribution of stellar and brown dwarf masses in a variety of environments, and mapped the orbits of brown dwarfs in binary pairs, it became clear that most brown dwarfs seem to form like scaled-down stars—but from a smaller reservoir of gas. And the fact that brown dwarfs form circumstellar disks raises the tantalizing possibility that they host planets.

Although we have never seen kamagra reviews forum any for sure, it is very likely that planets grow in these disks just as they do around stars. Scientists hope the coming years will finally see the confirmed discovery of worlds orbiting brown dwarfs. Recently researchers discovered isolated brown dwarfs with masses similar to those of giant planets (less than 13 times the mass of Jupiter), which again raised the question of how they might have formed.

Could some of these planetary-mass brown dwarfs have arisen in the circumstellar disks of more massive stars—in kamagra reviews forum other words, formed just as planets do?. To test the mechanism for the formation of planetlike masses, my colleagues and I proposed a survey with the Hubble Space Telescope. Because Hubble is in orbit, it avoids the smearing and absorption of light by Earth’s atmosphere, which makes it ideal for imaging binary pairs of brown dwarfs.

Through this survey, in 2020 we discovered a unique system of brown dwarfs kamagra reviews forum that strongly supports a starlike-formation mechanism for planetlike masses. The system, Oph 98 AB, is very young in cosmic terms (three million years old), and its two components weigh in at 15 and eight times the mass of Jupiter. These extremely low-mass objects are separated by 200 times the distance between Earth and the sun.

Because Oph 98 A and B are so light and so widely separated, the system has kamagra reviews forum the lowest gravitational binding energy of any known binary pair. The weak binding energy means that these bodies must have formed in their current orientation, rather than originating elsewhere and later becoming a pair, which points to a starlike-formation mechanism. And the young age of the system (yes, we consider three million years young!.

) means that kamagra reviews forum planetary-mass objects apparently do not take any longer to form than stars. New Insights Brown dwarf science has now reached a stage where we are able to make more precise measurements and ask more detailed questions than ever before about these still mysterious objects. Among the most interesting recent discoveries are the coldest brown dwarfs, known as Y dwarfs.

These objects kamagra reviews forum have temperatures ranging from 350 degrees F down to –10 degrees F. I love to joke when working on Y dwarfs that I am studying the coolest systems in the galaxy!. Though not quite as cold as Jupiter (–234 degrees F), these Y dwarfs have enabled us to make the first meaningful comparison between brown dwarfs and the atmospheres of the giant planets in our solar system.

Y dwarfs are difficult to observe because they are kamagra reviews forum both cool and very dim. The light they do emit is predominantly in the infrared range, at wavelengths of three to five microns, where Earth’s atmosphere makes observations difficult. Regardless, my colleagues and I have published spectra of several Y dwarfs and used theoretical models to infer the presence of water-ice clouds, as well as a significant amount of vertical mixing in the atmosphere.

In this same wavelength range, Jupiter emits its own light (rather than just kamagra reviews forum reflecting the light of our sun) and shows significant vertical mixing as well. Our hope is that by studying Y dwarfs, we will be able to disentangle properties of Jupiter that come from its planetary nature—in other words, the fact that it formed in the circumstellar disk of our sun and is constantly illuminated by sunlight—and properties that may be ubiquitous among cool gaseous objects, be they planets, exoplanets or brown dwarfs. Thus far our studies are showing that highly dynamic atmospheres tend to be the norm.

These insights kamagra reviews forum about brown dwarf atmospheres have led to a new subfield. Exometeorology. Although brown dwarfs are too far away for us to visually examine their atmospheric features, we can see their imprint through changes in brightness.

As a cloud or other feature rotates in and out of view, it changes the light coming from the brown kamagra reviews forum dwarf. Astronomers have analyzed the brightness variations of brown dwarfs over many rotations and have created maps of their spots and bands, which look remarkably like the familiar stripes and storms on the giant planets in our own solar system. Some brown dwarfs have been found to change in brightness by up to 25 percent over one rotation.

The results of these studies are leading us to better understand atmospheric processes more generally—we have found that brown dwarfs with temperatures at which clouds kamagra reviews forum break up show large variations in brightness and that young objects tend to show greater variability in brightness. Scientists have also discovered other similarities between brown dwarfs and gas giants. Both, for example, tend to have strong magnetic fields and aurorae, as revealed by radio observations of the signatures of charged particles spiraling in their magnetic fields.

The measured magnetic field strengths for brown dwarfs are 1,000 times kamagra reviews forum stronger than Jupiter’s magnetic field and 10,000 times stronger than Earth’s. I like to imagine what the night sky might look like from one of these brown dwarfs—given the beauty of Earth’s aurora borealis, it would likely be a spectacular sight. Recently a student’s question prompted another project to examine how the atmospheres on brown dwarfs compare with those on planets.

When I teach courses in introductory astronomy, we cover the planets of the solar kamagra reviews forum system (and of course, I sprinkle in a lot of information about brown dwarfs as well). A tidbit I present is that the length of a Jovian day depends on how you measure it. If you clock the motion of visible features in Jupiter’s equatorial region, you measure a rotation period that is five minutes shorter than the rotation period measured in the radio signal, which probes its interior rotation.

A student asked me why this difference in rotation period occurs, and I replied that it was because kamagra reviews forum Jupiter’s equatorial features are pushed along by strong zonal winds. The winds on Earth are driven by the redistribution of solar energy, but we are not sure to what degree this applies to Jupiter’s winds. After the lecture, I started thinking about this further.

Astronomers have measured radio emission in brown dwarfs, which occurs via the same mechanism as Jupiter’s radio emission, so kamagra reviews forum we can measure an interior rotation period. And we can use our method of monitoring brightness changes to measure the atmosphere’s rotation period. Thus, I hatched an idea to measure the wind speed on a brown dwarf for the first time.

The best candidate we had to try out the technique was a methane brown dwarf with confirmed radio emission kamagra reviews forum. To determine the wind speed, we would need to measure both periods to a precision of less than 30 seconds. My colleagues and I submitted a proposal to use the Spitzer Space Telescope to measure the brown dwarf’s brightness variations and applied to use the Karl G.

Jansky Very Large Array in New Mexico to measure a more precise radio period kamagra reviews forum. It still feels like a small miracle that our measurements revealed a period difference of just more than a minute, which equates to a wind speed of 2,300 kilometers per hour. We published our findings last year in the journal Science.

This high wind speed on an isolated brown dwarf means that atmospheric winds are not always driven by the redistribution of solar energy, leaving open the question of whether Jupiter’s winds are kamagra reviews forum driven by the sun. Astronomers continue to search for more brown dwarfs. Some surveys focus on identifying large samples of brown dwarfs via deep imaging surveys of the whole sky such as 2MASS, WISE, and the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS).

Citizen scientists have also become involved in the search through projects such as Backyard Worlds, which allows anyone to examine WISE data for signs of brown dwarfs and other kamagra reviews forum moving objects. We expect that upcoming large surveys with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory (due to begin observing early next year) and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (launching in 2025) will work to further complete our census of brown dwarfs.

Sadly, we could not get funding for kamagra reviews forum the telescope on Cerro Toco, and it was never built. But once the James Webb Space Telescope is launched later this year, astronomers will have an unprecedented look at brown dwarfs in the infrared, without interference from Earth’s atmosphere. The first cycle of observations planned includes programs to study the atmospheric chemistry of Y dwarfs and the cloud composition of dusty brown dwarfs and even a search for planetary systems around brown dwarfs.

Exciting times are certainly kamagra reviews forum ahead for those of us who study some of the cosmos’s most overlooked objects.California resident Mark Brown knows too well the danger that climate change poses to the West. A former fire team chief, Brown in 2018 responded to the Camp Fire blaze, California's deadliest wildfire. At least 85 people were killed in the multibillion-dollar disaster, including four victims who died in their cars trying to escape and a fifth person who perished in a desperate run for safety.

Brown's now working to ensure kamagra reviews forum that horror doesn't repeat itself. As an executive officer with the Marin Wildfire Prevention Authority, Brown is helping to reduce the risk of wildfire and plan for survival if one erupts. Of note are agency efforts to develop evacuation maps and remove flammable vegetation alongside key routes — all to prevent residents from dying as they try and get away.

"We need to make our kamagra reviews forum evacuation routes survivable in a traffic jam, so that even if [people] are caught in a traffic jam, they can stay in their car and they can survive in their car," said Brown, 52, retired deputy chief of the Marin County Fire Department. That's safer, he said, "than having to get out of the car and flee, and then get caught, and have no protection at all." It's part of a shift in the Golden State, where deadly and destructive fires have hit repeatedly over the last decade. Cities, counties and individuals are planning both to prevent fires, and to make sure people survive when blazes start.

Because with climate kamagra reviews forum change, fires burn hotter and faster. Fleeing for safety increasingly is the only choice. "People are realizing that the wildfires of today, the rate they're burning, the damage they're doing, the severity of them is not the type of wildfires that we saw 10-20-30 years ago," said Daniel Berlant, assistant deputy director at the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire.

"People really kamagra reviews forum are understanding that their life is on the line. They can't wait it out, or just use their garden hose." The emphasis on evacuations may have saved lives this summer. California is now battling the second-largest wildfire in state history — the Dixie Fire — yet so far there are no known fatalities.

That's in spite of the fact Dixie has burned more than 500,000 acres, destroyed a historic downtown and remains mostly out kamagra reviews forum of control in a rural area about 90 miles northeast of Chico, Calif. Officials credited planning that started years earlier, a community meeting on fire preparedness in May and people's willingness to leave when evacuations started. €œMost people, particularly in this part of the state of California ...

The remote areas, timbered areas, are aware of what happened in the Camp Fire and also the [2020] North Complex [Fire], and many other areas in the last few years," said Carson Wingfield, incident commander at the Dixie Fire's Emergency Operations Center, "So when we come through and we're asking them to go kamagra reviews forum ... They'll go, usually." State and local emergency officials said they hope a transformation is underway, as California confronts heightened wildfire risk. Cal Fire and the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES) are pressing local authorities to plan more aggressively for extreme fires.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency over the last five fiscal years has given roughly $62 million in hazard planning and prevention kamagra reviews forum assistance money, which Cal OES has passed through as grants. To be sure, prevention remains a top priority, and the state has spent billions of dollars in that area. But there's also a growing acceptance that some fires amplified by climate change are too ferocious to risk not evacuating.

"These are kamagra reviews forum fires that are burning at record speeds, with flame length sometimes hundreds of feet high, that are like a freight train," Berlant said. "Even our own firefighters, with the best equipment, the best training and experience on their side, we're challenged to fight and to stop these fires against the weather conditions we're experiencing. "We have seen a lot more people, I think, evacuated areas that maybe 10 years ago would have been a lot harder to get them to leave their homes," he added.

Deadly Camp Fire motivates action While state and local authorities for decades have done emergency planning, the 2018 Camp Fire, in the Sierra Nevada foothills, created kamagra reviews forum somewhat of a dividing line in people's outlook, several experts said. That fire gutted the town of Paradise, about 90 miles north of Sacramento. Claudine Jaenichen, a consultant who's worked with 24 cities to draw up emergency evacuation maps, said the Camp Fire heightened many people's awareness about where they live and their potential escape routes.

Residents living where Dixie is burning kamagra reviews forum — in Butte, Plumas and Tehama counties — feel the fear of fire with a particular resonance, several said. The area is about 80 miles northeast of Paradise. Many Plumas County residents knew people in Paradise, went there to get groceries or had driven through on their way to Chico, said Brian Ferguson, spokesman with Cal OES.

The North Complex Fire, kamagra reviews forum also in the region, last year killed 16 people. Cal OES oversees emergency plans each county must develop. Since the Camp Fire, the state has emphasized getting counties to scrutinize and maintain those plans.

Ferguson said identifying roads used for evacuations "is kamagra reviews forum certainly a point of emphasis that's been made." Wingfield cautioned that the lack of fatalities so far in the Dixie Fire is a "transient” number. There's still the possibility of finding a death after the fire is extinguished, he said, though no residents are unaccounted for right now. The region where Dixie is burning also is sparsely populated, and that helped get people out.

Quincy, where Plumas County government is located, kamagra reviews forum has a population of fewer than 2,000 people. The total county population is about 19,000. In evacuations for the Dixie Fire, Plumas County sheriff's deputies "tried to go and knock on every door and verify that we've gone back to every resident," Wingfield said.

That's not possible kamagra reviews forum in more populated areas. So some California cities are incorporating a new type of warning system. A European hi-lo siren to alert residents.

Legislation that passed last year kamagra reviews forum allowed its use, which had been prohibited. The state in 2019 also streamlined its evacuation alert system. Previously there were three tiers.

Evacuation warning, voluntary kamagra reviews forum evacuations and mandatory evacuations. Now there are just two. Evacuation warning and evacuation orders.

"The 'voluntary evacuation' moniker was often challenging for the public to interpret, and slowed response times," Ferguson with Cal OES wrote in an kamagra reviews forum email. Cities and counties are crafting plans to help people escape. Jaenichen, the consultant who's worked with 24 cities on evacuation maps, said she emphasizes the importance of making sure residents are given the information in multiple formats.

For example, the cities she works with create QR codes that people scan with cellphones to get kamagra reviews forum the information. That helps track how many people access it. Residents tax themselves for fire work Jaenichen worked with Marin County, the San Francisco-area region where Brown lives.

The county last year put a measure on the kamagra reviews forum ballot to fund the Marin Wildfire Prevention Authority. Residents agreed to tax themselves 10 cents per square foot of building space they own for the effort. It's expected to generate about $20 million annually for a decade for fire prevention and evacuation work.

About 240,000 people live in the 17 cities, towns and districts that are part of the Marin Wildfire Prevention kamagra reviews forum Authority’s work. Jaenichen also worked with Laguna Beach, in Orange County, between San Diego and Los Angeles. The coastal city is the site of one of the most destructive fires in U.S.

History. In 1993, fire there consumed 441 homes. It forced the evacuation of 23,000 people.

Nearly all of Laguna Beach is considered a "Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone" by Cal Fire. Moreover, there are only three ways in and out of the beach town. The Laguna Beach City Council in late 2018 — not long after the Camp Fire — created a Wildfire Mitigation and Fire Safety Subcommittee to analyze risk.

The council since has approved several mitigation measures. Those moves include cutting back more vegetation and expanding the city's outdoor warning system — 21 speakers installed around town. The city also spent more than $197,000 for a study that analyzed how long it would take to evacuate all its residents.

The analysis gave estimates for getting people out under various conditions, such as night or day, winter or summer, and weekend or weekday. In the best-case scenario, with no roadway hazards or closures or smoke limiting driver vision, it would take four hours and 20 minutes to evacuate the city of all its 23,000 residents, the study said. Closure of major roads could nearly double that time.

The city plans to use the results "to update evacuation plans, install evacuation route signage, pre-stage traffic management supplies, and conduct community outreach and education," Cassie Walder, a spokeswoman for the city, wrote in an email. Nearby in Irvine, officials did similar planning. The city of 273,000 analyzed potential wildfire spread as part of its preparation, said Casey George, the city's open space administrator.

Irvine drew up a citywide evacuation plan. "We put each part of the city into zones, and each zone has an average number of residents, vehicles and so on," George said. There's an emergency alert that sends the information to cellphones, so residents "click on that link, and it will show that [evacuation] route that they should take." Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC.

Copyright 2021. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.“In nature nothing exists alone,” wrote Rachel Carson in her 1962 book Silent Spring. She warned that pesticides absorbed by soil run into streams, rivers and reservoirs unnoticed, poisoning living creatures along the way.

Carson ignited the modern environmental movement by showing that stewardship of the living earth begins with simple attention. Her task would likely have been far easier if people could see this interconnected life up close.A lot has changed since then. Glowing tardigrade muscles, erectile dysfunction s in bat brain cells, a thrilling flight through a seven-day-old chicken embryo’s nervous system—such otherwise invisible small worlds pulse with energy, undeniably alive.

Now in its 11th year, Nikon’s Small World in Motion competition has made these phenomena, and more, visible—collected from microscopes around the world. The first-place winner this year, amateur microscopist Fabian J. Weston in Pennant Hills, Australia, captured the symbiotic relationship between termites and the single-celled microorganisms found inside them.

Within the insects’ gut, these microbes, called protists, help them digest the cellulose—the main component of plants’ cell walls—that they eat and cycle carbon back into the soil. €œThere is a significant gap in our understanding about these termite symbionts and how this unique evolutionary relationship developed with its host, making it well worth exploring and presenting,” Weston told the competition organizers. He hopes the final result will bring greater public awareness to the role that all protists play in every ecosystem on earth.

To capture the video, Weston used a research microscope from the 1970s and polarized light. The final result took months of trial and error and minute changes to the pH, chemical composition and temperature of the termites’ environment tokeep both the insects and the protists inside them alive. The second-place winners, molecular biologists Stephanie Hachey and Christopher Hughes, both at the University of California, Irvine, shot a time-lapse video of an engineered human micro tumor forming and metastasizing, with images taken every 15 minutes for 10 consecutive days.

The 2021 winners and honorable mentions explored wildly distinct tiny corners of the universe that were magnified by up to 120 times. In each case, it’s impossible to ignore the thrumming vitality seen beneath the surface.As scientists and engineers, we feel privileged to have careers that contribute to the progress of knowledge and understanding. The rewards of participating in research and discovery and of mentoring emerging scientists are immense.

Science itself is an extraordinary and essential institution. It continues to thrive after centuries of human ingenuity and effort, and to provide significant advancements for societal well-being in areas such as understanding and mitigating global environmental change, achieving innovations for improving public health, and creating technological solutions to widespread societal challenges. However, science does not happen in a vacuum.

It is a social process and therefore exhibits cultural norms and social patterns that affect scientific practices and outcomes. Opportunities and entryways into STEM careers are unequally available to all members of our society, with the result that the practice of science is limited demographically. Further, the benefits of the scientific enterprise have disproportionately benefited members of the upper echelons, and the scientific enterprise has too often been aligned with injustices that reinforce the oppression of the racially disenfranchised, women and LGBTQ communities.

Finally, the culture of science has evolved in ways that reinforce its image as a career path that is unwelcoming to socially subordinated groups. When budding scientists first enter the discipline, it is usually because we are inspired by curiosity, passionate about understanding the natural world and/or eager to contribute to a better society. We don’t typically know much about the culture of science at first.

And we certainly do not realize the enormous historical legacy nor the social and power dynamics of the science ecosystem we are becoming a part of. We begin our careers in a focused disciplinary area, and we very slowly learn how to navigate the science system, the idiosyncrasies of the academy and the requirements for success in a STEM career. Not everyone who enters stays.

Looked at as a whole, the scientific enterprise comprises a system of people, ideas, projects, resources, norms and institutions. A “science of science” approach effectively highlights the deep interconnectedness between scientists, knowledge creation and knowledge, but it requires more study regarding the links between the diversity or lack of diversity of scientists and knowledge outcomes. This is because those who participate in science are not at all reflective of our society.

African Americans, Latinos, American Indians and other racially disenfranchised persons represent only about 9 percent of STEM academic positions in the United States, and that number has barely grown over four decades. This percentage is in sharp contrast to the changing demography in the U.S. Women (primarily white women) now earn approximately 41% of STEM doctorate degrees and have increased their share of STEM academic positions to approximately 39% but are not at parity with men especially at higher career positions.

Attrition of female scientists increases as they move up the career ladder, with a 19.5% higher dropout rate over male scientists. Meanwhile, calls for broadening participation in STEM fields are increasing and many investments in excellent programs aimed at advancing STEM diversity, equity and inclusion have been made. Thus far, the majority of efforts have been directed at increasing entry opportunities and training a diverse STEM workforce.

So-called “pipeline interventions.” So why has meaningful progress been so slow?. The long answer involves a clear-eyed view of obstacles to equity (especially systemic racism and sexism in our society and therefore our science system), overrepresentation of a narrow demographic in STEM, outdated but entrenched leadership models, uniquely imbalanced and potentially harmful power dynamics in the academy, and many other issues. The short answer?.

It’s the system, not the participants. This means that we should be focusing more of our efforts on systemic reform for the future of science. The current culture of our science system is an anachronism in today’s world and must change with the times.

Today’s system remains rooted in norms and practices that were established decades ago by and for a narrow subset of society. Criteria for entry and advancement, definitions of excellence and success, institutional policies and values, and the incentive systems that determine STEM career trajectories all require a reboot if we are to diversify the system beyond the relatively unencumbered and advantaged members of society. This is becoming increasingly clear via surveys of the scientific community as well.

To its participants, our science system is increasingly perceived as highly competitive, aggressive, demographically exclusionary and still jarringly reflective of its historical roots in a Eurocentric, white, patriarchal society. To be a “successful” scientist today, one must follow a fairly predictable track up the career ladder that is increasingly competitive, monetized and metricized — raising the question whether we have come to a place where we value what we can measure rather than measure what we should value. One must continually compete for research funding, and one’s advancement, promotion and credibility are linked to how much grant funding is brought into one’s institution.

This model can be even more challenging for scientists from racially disenfranchised groups and for women because of social and family pressures that may affect them differently, especially in early career stages. Also, research shows that women and racial minorities in STEM often wish to pursue scientific questions that are different from those of the socially dominant community of scientists. The pressure to obtain research dollars is matched only by the pressure to publish research findings as quickly and as often as possible in the ‘highest-impact’ journals, and to increase the number of citations your publications attract (measured by various widely utilized performance metrics).

Like research funding, the publish-or-perish treadmill also suffers from the question of what is most interesting to those in power in the science system. And our peer review system – depending on how it is implemented – suffers from explicit and implicit biases. Driven by metric-based criteria for recognition and promotion, thre prevalent transactional models of leadership in STEM do not select for a diverse, collaborative workforce.

Self-promotion is also a required skill in this environment. To succeed, one should be marketing oneself and garnering as much social media attention as possible (measured by Altmetric Attention scores and other indices). It’s obvious where this road can lead in terms of science quality and the social dynamics of vying for attention.

In addition, subordinated groups in science are not as visible to the science press as are the dominant groups, and they are not perceived as the faces of science thought leadership. At times, social attention for scholars of color and for women may result in negative attention and/or retribution. see the recent case of Pulitzer Prize–winner Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of the New York Times’ 1619 Project, and the associated UNC tenure controversy.

The established measures of success select for highly competitive rather than collaborative environments. A STEM workforce lacking diversity. A narrow demographic at the top.

A style of mentoring that elevates the success of mentors more than that of mentees. And potentially harmful environments for groups underrepresented in science. For example, a recent report on sexual harassment in STEM issued by the National Academy of Sciences reports that academic science is second only to the military in rates of gender harassment, taking an astonishing and corrosive toll on women who enter STEM fields.

Minority scientists, who are too often unrepresented in scientific departments, are immersed in unwelcoming environments and historically not given credit for their research contributions. Given this state of affairs, the failure to “move the needle” on diversity, equity and inclusion in STEM seems not only understandable but inevitable. Even if successful in their fields, these dynamics can present a gauntlet of stressful hazards to the personal well-being of scientists.

The toll is also seen in the harm done to institutional reputations when the behavior of some scholars becomes public. So, why should we all care about this?. Isn’t science progressing faster all the time?.

Isn’t the rate of research publications steadily increasing?. Don’t many foreign scientists come to the U.S. To work in our first-class science system?.

Well, yes, all true—but creating systemic culture change in STEM in order to diversify the STEM workforce matters critically for the future advancement of science and the translation of its benefits to society. True diversity, equity and inclusion within the scientific community will have a major positive impact for addressing the increasingly complex issues that lie at the heart of the science-society-policy intersection. It matters significantly – arguably more than any other issue – for the future of science.

It matters because scientific conclusions are shaped by the kinds of questions asked, by who conducts research, and by who asks scientific questions (e.g., do health trials include all demographic sectors of society?. ). It matters because research demonstrates that better science outcomes, enhanced innovation, and increased creativity result from broader perspectives and diverse participants (e.g., are diverse viewpoints at the innovation tables?.

). It matters because research priorities that determine who benefits from science and technological advances are set differently by different identities in science (e.g., are technological advances considering impacts on all communities?. ).

It matters because the vital link between scientific outcomes and evidence-based public policy relies on public trust in science—and public trust in science in turn relies on full participation, engagement and representativeness in science. And finally, it matters because the scientific enterprise in the U.S. Is funded largely by the public and should therefore include and benefit the entire public.

Our science system is supported by societal investments, the so-called “Science Bargain” or “Science-Society Contract.” Many in science are unaware of a 1945 report called Science. The Endless Frontier, but that report was a landmark policy document for government (public) support of science in this nation. The report was published at the end of World War II by Vannevar Bush, director of the federal Office of Scientific Research and Development at the time.

Bush argued that government spending on university-based and research institution–based science during the war effort should be continued in our postwar society but redirected to the nation’s scientists who were pursuing basic research at our top universities. Thus, research universities and the federal government (and thereby the U.S. Public) entered into an implicit partnership, with the shared goal of stimulating knowledge generation in the service of society.

It seems obvious that, because the public underwrites the scientific effort in the U.S., the entire public deserves to fully participate in the system and to fully benefit from its advances. But that part of the vision remains unrealized at this moment in time. And, if none of those arguments (societally relevant science, more innovative science, more representative science, enhanced public trust in science, financially responsible science) are persuasive, then transforming our science system towards a more just, equitable and inclusive enterprise is still imperative—because it is the morally right thing to do.

In the current social context of renewed attention to addressing societal inequities and injustices across many of our American institutions, we cannot leave a science reckoning out of the mix. Science, too, is a social justice issue. A healthy debate regarding the historical inequities of the science system is already underway.

Who gets to participate in science?. Who benefits from it?. Who is sometimes harmed by it?.

Who sets the important research priorities?. When viewed through a social justice lens, the deep misalignment between societal demographics and practicing scientists today is clearly even more unsustainable. The goal, then, is to build a STEM culture of inclusivity and a more representative science that becomes normative through a coordinated, systemic transformation.

We have a unique opportunity to transform the current science paradigm given the social and political times we live in and given that the system is already recently disrupted. To succeed, long-entrenched obstacles to this vision will need to be dismantled. the aforementioned culture of science is one such obstacle.

But there is much more. Inequity in educational opportunity. Myths of meritocracy.

Oversimplified metrics for success. Entrenched legacy attitudes about excellence, competition and the faces of leadership. Career advancement and tenure criteria that do not necessarily align with the values of diverse stakeholders.

Unwelcoming or hostile work environments in classroom, laboratory and fieldwork. And more. In a sense, reforming our science system is both simple and complicated.

Simple in the sense that we just need the political will to transform. Complicated in the sense that we are seeking to transform a complex and highly interconnected system with reinforcing feedback dynamics yet many disconnected components. These components include STEM educational systems, higher education, academic institutions, scientific disciplines and professional societies, individual scientists, science policies, the science publishing industry, research funding agencies, and more.

All these components must coordinate and align for significant systemic change to occur. For example, increasing diversity of the STEM pipeline and those at early career stages will not ultimately be successful if the culture of academic institutions does not change to accommodate the lives of diverse participants or if bias keeps them marginalized or drives them out of the system. Because advancing equity, diversity and inclusion in the scientific enterprise is therefore a systems-based challenge, it will require a more coordinated and centralized effort that includes all the embedded components working together towards common goals.

Although complex and challenging, such an undertaking will be more than worth the effort. With enormous challenges and possibilities in front of us, science needs all hands on deck. Let’s create a science system that is by all and for all, adjust the course of the astonishing human history of science towards a more just and inclusive enterprise, and fulfill a more complete vision of the science-society bargain.

This is an opinion and analysis article. The views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American. Any opinion, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or United States government, the AAAS, or any of the authors’ home institutions.Simple mathematical concepts such as counting appear to be firmly anchored in the natural process of thinking.

Studies have shown that even very young children and animals possess such skills to a certain extent. This is hardly surprising because counting is extremely useful in terms of evolution. For example, it is required for even very simple forms of trading.

And counting helps in estimating the size of a hostile group and, accordingly, whether it is better to attack or retreat.Over the past millennia, humans have developed a remarkable notion of counting. Originally applied to a handful of objects, it was easily extended to vastly different orders of magnitude. Soon a mathematical framework emerged that could be used to describe huge quantities, such as the distance between galaxies or the number of elementary particles in the universe, as well as barely conceivable distances in the microcosm, between atoms or quarks.We can even work with numbers that go beyond anything currently known to be relevant in describing the universe.

For example, the number 1010100 (one followed by 10100 zeros, with 10100 representing one followed by 100 zeros) can be written down and used in all kinds of calculations. Writing this number in ordinary decimal notation, however, would require more elementary particles than are probably contained in the universe, even employing just one particle per digit. Physicists estimate that our cosmos contains fewer than 10100 particles.

Yet even such unimaginably large numbers are vanishingly small, compared with infinite sets, which have played an important role in mathematics for more than 100 years. Simply counting objects gives rise to the set of natural numbers, ℕ = {0, 1, 2, 3, …}, which many of us encounter in school. Yet even this seemingly simple concept poses a challenge.

There is no largest natural number. If you keep counting, you will always be able to find a larger number. Can there actually be such a thing as an infinite set?.

In the 19th century, this question was very controversial. In philosophy, this may still be the case. But in modern mathematics, the existence of infinite sets is simply assumed to be true—postulated as an axiom that does not require proof.Set theory is about more than describing sets.

Just as, in arithmetic, you learn to apply arithmetical operations to numbers—for example, addition or multiplication—you can also define set-theoretical operations that generate new sets from given ones. You can take unions—{1, 2} and {2, 3, 4} becomes {1, 2, 3, 4}—or intersections—{1, 2} and {2, 3, 4} becomes {2}. More excitingly, you can form power sets—the family of all subsets of a set.Comparing Set SizesThe power set P(X) of a set X can be easily calculated for small X.

For instance, {1, 2} gives you P({1,2}) = {{}, {1}, {2}, {1, 2}}. But P(X) grows rapidly for larger X. For example, every 10-element set has 210 = 1,024 subsets.

If you really want to challenge your imagination, try forming the power set of an infinite set. For example, the power set of the natural numbers, P(ℕ), contains the empty set, ℕ itself, the set of all even numbers, the prime numbers, the set of all numbers with the sum of digits totaling 2021, {12, 17}, and much, much more. As it turns out, the number of elements of this power set exceeds the number of elements in the set of natural numbers.To understand what that means, you first have to understand how the size of sets is defined.

For the finite case, you can count the respective elements. For instance, {1, 2, 3} and {Cantor, Gödel, Cohen} are of the same size. If you wish to compare sets with numerous (but finitely many) elements, there are two well-established methods.

One possibility is to count the objects contained in each set and compare the numbers. Sometimes, however, it is easier to match the elements of one set to another. Then two sets are of the same size if and only if each element of one set can be uniquely paired with an element of the other set (in our example.

1 → Cantor, 2 →Gödel, 3 →Cohen).This pairing method also works for infinite sets. Here, instead of first counting and then deriving concepts such as “greater than” or “equal to,” you follow a reverse strategy. You start with defining what it means that two sets, A and B, are of the same size—namely, there is a mapping that pairs each element of A with exactly one element of B (so that no element of B is left over).

Such a mapping is called bijection.Similarly, A is defined to be less than or equal to B if there is a mapping from A to B that uses each element of B once at most.After we have these notions, the size of sets is denoted by cardinal numbers, or cardinals. For finite sets, these are the usual natural numbers. But for infinite sets, they are abstract quantities that just capture the notion of “size.” For example, “countable” is the cardinal number of the natural numbers (and therefore of every set that has the same size as the natural numbers).

It turns out that there are different cardinals. That is, there are infinite sets A and B with no bijection between them.At first sight, this definition of size seems to lead to contradictions, which were elaborated by the Bohemian mathematician Bernard Bolzano in Paradoxes of the Infinite, published posthumously in 1851. For example, Euclid’s “The whole is greater than the part” appears self-evident.

That means if a set A is a proper subset of B (that is, every element of A is in B, but B contains additional elements), then A must be smaller than B. This assertion is not true for infinite sets, however!. This curious property is one reason some scholars rejected the concept of infinite sets more than 100 years ago.For example, the set of even numbers E = {0, 2, 4, 6, …} is a proper subset of the natural numbers ℕ = {0, 1, 2, …}.

Intuitively, you might think that the set E is half the size of ℕ. But in fact, based on our definition, the sets have the same size because each number n in E can be assigned to exactly one number in ℕ (0 →0, 2 →1, 4 →2, …, n →n/2, …).Consequently, the concept of “size” for sets could be dismissed as nonsensical. Alternatively, it could be termed something else.

Cardinality, for example. For the sake of simplicity, we will stick to the conventional terminology, even though it has unexpected consequences at infinity.In the late 1800s, German logician Georg Cantor, founder of modern set theory, discovered that not all infinite sets are equal. According to his proof, the power set P(X) of a (finite or infinite) set X is always larger than X itself.

Among other things, it follows that there is no largest infinity and thus no “set of all sets.” An Unresolved Hypothesis There is, however, something akin to a smallest infinity. All infinite sets are greater than or equal to the natural numbers. Sets X that have the same size as ℕ (with a bijection between ℕ and X) are called countable.

Their cardinality is denoted ℵ0, or aleph null. For every infinite cardinal ℵa, there is a next larger cardinal number ℵa+1. Thus, the smallest infinite cardinal ℵ0 is followed by ℵ1, then ℵ2 and so on.

The set ℝ of real numbers (also called the real line) is as large as the power set of ℕ, and this cardinality is denoted 2ℵ0, or “continuum.”In the 1870s, Cantor ruminated over whether the size of ℝ was the smallest possible cardinal above ℵ0—in other words, whether ℵ1 = 2ℵ0. Previously, every infinite subset of ℝ that had been studied had turned out to be either as large as ℕ or ℝ itself. This led Cantor to what is known as the continuum hypothesis (CH).

The assertion that the size of ℝ is the smallest possible uncountable cardinal. For decades, CH kept mathematicians busy, but a proof eluded them. Later, it became clear their efforts had been doomed from the start.Set theory is extremely powerful.

It can describe virtually all mathematical concepts. But it also has limitations. The field is based on the axiomatic system formulated more than 100 years ago by German logician Ernst Zermelo and elaborated by his German-Israeli colleague Abraham Fraenkel.

Called ZFC, or Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory (C stands for “axiom of choice”), the system is a collection of basic assumptions sufficient to carry out almost all of mathematics. Very few problems require additional assumptions. But in 1931 Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel recognized that the system has a fundamental defect.

It is incomplete. That is, it is possible to formulate mathematical statements that can neither be refuted nor proved using ZFC. Among other things, it is impossible for a system to prove its own consistency.The most famous example of undecidability in set theory is CH.

In a paper published in 1938, Gödel proved that CH cannot be disproved within ZFC. Neither can it be proved, as Paul Cohen showed 25 years later. It is thus impossible to solve CH using the usual axioms of set theory.

Consequently, it remains unclear whether sets exist that are both larger than the natural numbers and smaller than the real numbers.Cardinality is not the only notion to describe the size of a set. For example, from the point of view of geometry, subsets of the real line ℝ, the two-dimensional plane (sometimes called the x-y plane) or the three-dimensional space can be assigned length, area or volume. A set of points in the plane forming a rectangle with side lengths a and b has an area of a ∙b.

Calculating the area of more complicated subsets of the plane sometimes requires other tools, such as the integral calculus taught in school. This method does not suffice for certain complex sets. But many can still be quantified using the Lebesgue measure, a function that assigns length, area or volume to extremely complicated objects.

Even so, it is possible to define subsets of ℝ, or the plane, that are so frayed that they cannot be measured at all.In two-dimensional space, a line (such as the circumference of a circle, a finite segment or a straight line) is always measurable, and its area is zero. It is therefore called a null set. Null sets can also be defined in one dimension.

On the real line, the set with two elements—for example {3, 5}—has a measure zero, whereas an interval such as [3, 5]—that is, the real numbers between three and five—has a measure two. Negligible Sets The concept of a null set is extremely useful in mathematics. Often, a theorem is not true for all real numbers but can be proved for all real numbers outside of a null set.

This is usually good enough for most applications. Yet null sets may seem quite large. For example, the rational numbers within the real line are a null set even though there are infinitely many of them.

This is because any countable—or finite—set is a null set. The converse is not true. A subset of the x-y plane with a large cardinality need be neither measurable nor of large measure.

For example, the entire plane with its 2ℵ0 elements has an infinite measure. But the x axis with the same cardinality has a two-dimensional measure (or “area”) zero and thus is a null set of the plane. Such “negligible” sets led to fundamental questions about the size of 10 infinite cardinals, which remained unanswered for a long time.

For example, mathematicians wished to know the minimum size a set must have for it not to be a null set. The family of all null sets is denoted by 𝒩, and the smallest cardinality of a non-null set is denoted by non(𝒩). It follows that ℵ0 <.

Non(𝒩) ≤ 2ℵ0, because any set of size ℵ0 is a null set, and the whole plane has size 2ℵ0 and is not a null set. Thus, ℵ1≤ non(𝒩) ≤ 2ℵ0, because ℵ1 is the smallest uncountable cardinal. If we assume CH, then non(𝒩) = 2ℵ0, because, in that case, ℵ1 = 2ℵ0.

We can define another cardinal number, add(𝒩), to answer the question, What is the minimal number of null sets whose union is a non-null set?. This number is less than or equal to non(𝒩). If A is a non-null set containing non(𝒩) many elements, the union of all the non(𝒩) many one-element subsets of A is the non-null set A.

But a smaller number of null sets (though they would not be one-element sets) could also satisfy the requirements. Therefore, add(𝒩) ≤ non(𝒩) holds. The cardinal cov(𝒩) is the smallest number of null sets whose union yields the whole plane.

It is also easy to see that add(𝒩) is smaller than or equal to cov(𝒩) because, as already mentioned, the plane is a non-null set. We can also consider cof(𝒩), the smallest possible size for a basis X of 𝒩. That is, a set X of null sets that contains a superset B of every null set A.

(That means A is a subset of B.) These infinite cardinals—add(𝒩), cov(𝒩), non(𝒩) and cof(𝒩)—are important characteristics of the family of null sets. For each of these four cardinal characteristics, an analogous characteristic can be defined using a different concept of small, or negligible, sets. This other notion of smallness is “meager.” A meager set is a set contained in the countable union of nowhere dense sets, such as the circumference of a circle in the plane, or finitely or countably many such circumferences.

In one dimension, the normal numbers form a meager set on the real line, while the remaining reals, the non-normal numbers, constitute a null set. Accordingly, the corresponding cardinal characteristics can be defined for the family of meager sets. Add(ℳ), non(ℳ), cov(ℳ) and cof(ℳ).

Under CH, all characteristics are the same, namely ℵ1, for both null and meager sets. On the other hand, using the method of “forcing,” developed by Cohen, mathematicians Kenneth Kunen and Arnold Miller were able to show in 1981 that it is impossible to prove the statement add(𝒩) = add(ℳ) within ZFC. In other words, the numbers of null and meager sets that must be combined to produce a non-negligible set are not provably equal.

Forcing is a method to construct mathematical universes. A mathematical universe is a model that satisfies the ZFC axioms. To show that a statement X is not refutable in ZFC, it is enough to find a universe in which both ZFC and X are valid.

Similarly, to show that X is not provable from ZFC, it is enough to find a universe where ZFC holds but X fails. Mathematical Universes with Surprising Properties Kunen and Miller used this method to construct a mathematical universe that satisfies add(𝒩) <. Add(ℳ).

In this model, more meager than null sets are required to form a non-negligible set. Accordingly, it is impossible to prove add(𝒩) add(ℳ) from ZFC.In contrast, Tomek Bartoszyński discovered three years later that the converse inequality add(𝒩) ≤ add(ℳ) can be proved using ZFC. This points to an asymmetry between the two notions of smallness.

Let us note that this asymmetry is not visible if we assume CH because CH implies ℵ1 = add(𝒩) = add(ℳ). To summarize. Add(𝒩) ≤ add(ℳ) is provable, but neither add(𝒩) = add(ℳ) nor add(𝒩) <.

Add(ℳ) is provable. This is the same effect as with CH. It is trivial to prove that ℵ1 ≤ 2ℵ0, but neither ℵ1 <.

2ℵ0 nor ℵ1 = 2ℵ0 is provable. In addition to the cardinal numbers defined so far, there are two important cardinal characteristics—𝔟 and 𝔡—that refer to dominating functions of real numbers. For two continuous functions (of which there are 2ℵ0 many) f and g, f is said to be dominated by g if the inequality f(x) <.

G(x) holds for all sufficiently large x. For example, a quadratic function such as g(x) = x2 always dominates a linear function, say f(x) = 100x + 30.The cardinal number 𝔡 is defined as the smallest possible size of a set of continuous functions sufficient to dominate every possible continuous function.A variant of this definition gives the cardinal number 𝔟, namely the smallest size of a family B with the property that there is no continuous function that dominates all functions of B. It can be shown that ℵ1 ≤ 𝔟 ≤ 𝔡 ≤ 2ℵ0 holds.Several additional inequalities have been shown to hold between the 12 infinite cardinals we just defined.

All these inequalities are summarized in Cichoń’s diagram, introduced by British mathematician David Fremlin in 1984 and named after his Polish colleague Jacek Cichoń. For typographical reasons, the less-or-equal signs are replaced by arrows. Credit.

Jakob Kellner There are two additional relations. Add(ℳ) is the smaller one of 𝔟 and cov(ℳ). Likewise, cof(ℳ) is the larger of 𝔡 and non(ℳ).

These two “dependent” cardinals are marked with a frame in the Cichoń diagram. The diagram thus comprises 12 uncountable cardinalities of which no more than 10 can be simultaneously different. How Different Can Infinities Be?.

If CH holds, however, ℵ1 (the smallest number in the diagram) is equal to 2ℵ0 (the largest number in the diagram), and thus all entries are equal. If, on the other hand, we assume CH to be false, then they could be quite different.For several decades, mathematicians tried to show that none of the less-or-equal relations in Cichoń’s diagram can be strengthened to equalities. To do that, they constructed many different universes in which they assigned the two smallest uncountable cardinals, ℵ1 and ℵ2, to the entries of the diagram in various ways.

For example, they created a universe for which ℵ1 = add(𝒩) = cov(𝒩) and ℵ2 = non(ℳ) = cof(ℳ).This work enabled researchers in the 1980s to confirm that for all pairs of cardinals, only the relationships indicated in the diagram can be proved in ZFC. More precisely, for every labeling of the (independent) Cichoń diagram entries with the values ℵ1 and ℵ2 that honors the inequalities of the diagram, there is a universe that realizes the given labeling.So we have known for nearly four decades that all assignments of ℵ1 and ℵ2 to the diagram are possible. But what can we say for more than two values?.

Could, for example, all the independent entries be simultaneously different?. Some cases with three characteristics have been known for 50 years, and in the 2010s, more universes were discovered (or constructed) in which up to seven different cardinals appeared in the Cichoń diagram.In a 2019 paper we constructed with Israeli mathematician Saharon Shelah of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a universe in which the maximum possible number of different infinite values—10, that is—appears in Cichoń’s diagram. In doing so, however, we used a stronger system of axioms than ZFC, one that assumes the existence of “large cardinals,” infinities whose existence is not provable in ZFC alone.While we were very pleased with this result, we were not entirely satisfied.

We worked for two more years to find a solution using only the ZFC axioms. Together with Shelah and Colombian mathematician Diego Mejía of Shizuoka University in Japan, we finally succeeded in proving the result without these additional assumptions.We have thus shown that the 10 characteristics of the real numbers can all be different. Let us note that we did not show that there can be at least, at most or precisely 10 infinite cardinals between ℵ1 and the continuum.

This was already proved by Robert Solovay in 1963. In fact, the size of the set of real numbers can vary greatly. There could be eight, 27 or infinitely many cardinal numbers between ℵ1 and 2ℵ0—even uncountably many.

Rather our result proves that there are mathematical universes in which the 10 specific cardinal numbers between ℵ1 and 2ℵ0 turn out to be different. This is not the end of the story. As is usual for mathematics, many questions remain open, and new ones arise.

For example, in addition to the cardinal numbers described here, many other infinite cardinalities lying between ℵ1 and the continuum have been discovered since the 1940s. Their precise relationships to one another are unknown. To distinguish some of these characteristics in addition to those in Cichoń’s diagram is one of the upcoming challenges.

Another one is to show that other orderings of 10 different values are possible. Unlike in the case for the two values ℵ1 and ℵ2, where we know that all possible orders are consistent, in the case of all 10 values, we could only show the consistency of two different orderings. So, who knows, there may still be hitherto undiscovered equalities—involving more than two characteristics—hidden in the diagram.This article originally appeared in Spektrum der Wissenschaft and was reproduced with permission..

Breathe Where can you buy lasix over the counter cheap kamagra online canada. Breathe. I repeated these words to myself like a mantra. At 18,400 feet, my body was craving oxygen, and I had to concentrate on pulling enough cheap kamagra online canada air into my lungs. I was on the summit of Cerro Toco, a stratovolcano overlooking Chile’s Chajnantor Plateau, now home to the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, one of the world’s premier radio telescopes.

Between the thin atmosphere and the barren red terrain of the mountain, it felt like I was on Mars. My colleagues and cheap kamagra online canada I were testing the atmospheric conditions on Cerro Toco. If they were good enough, they might justify taking on the technical challenges of building an observatory at such a remote, high-altitude site. Earth’s atmosphere is a problem for astronomers, and clouds frustrate many an observer. Atmospheric turbulence smears starlight, making stars appear to dance and flicker when cheap kamagra online canada close to the horizon.

Molecules such as water vapor and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere absorb incoming starlight, particularly infrared light. With more than half of Earth’s air below the summit of Cerro Toco (a point repeatedly raised by my burning lungs), we hoped that new and exciting insights could come from a dedicated infrared telescope there. The sense of adventure that had led me to this summit cheap kamagra online canada had also sparked my fascination with infrared astronomy, where scientists peer at the cosmos in light too red for the human eye to see. Infrared light tends to come from the dimmest and most distant objects observable. One class of objects best seen in the infrared is brown dwarfs.

When I was in graduate school in the early 2000s, cheap kamagra online canada these bodies had only recently been discovered, and they presented many tempting mysteries. I came to be captivated by these uncanny orbs, which, in terms of their classification, occupy a boundary zone between stars and planets. I wondered where and how they formed and what they were like. I learned through my research that in addition to being interesting in their own right, brown dwarfs serve as an important cheap kamagra online canada bridge to our understanding of both planets and stars, with temperatures and masses intermediate between the two. Now I and other brown dwarf astronomers are enjoying a sweet spot for research—there are still many brown dwarfs waiting to be discovered, and we can build on the wealth of previous research to uncover new details of physical processes at work on these objects.

We finally have the technological tools to study the atmospheres of brown dwarfs, for example, as well as their wind and rotation speeds, and to try to determine whether they might even host planets of their own. In-Between Objects Most stars are powered by the fusion of hydrogen into helium, a wonderfully stable process that keeps stars burning at the same temperature and brightness for billions cheap kamagra online canada of years. But if a would-be star never reaches high-enough temperatures or pressures to sustain hydrogen fusion, it is a brown dwarf, with a maximum mass of 8 percent of our sun’s, or about 80 times the mass of Jupiter. Recent studies indicate that brown dwarfs are nearly as common as stars, and they are everywhere. Brown dwarfs have been found in stellar nurseries cheap kamagra online canada alongside young protostars.

They have been found in binary systems paired with white dwarfs, having survived potential engulfment by the white dwarf’s previous red giant form. (Our sun, a yellow dwarf star, will one day turn into a bloated red giant, and after it dies, it will become a white dwarf.) Some of the closest stellar systems to our sun are brown dwarfs—the third and fourth nearest extrasolar systems, at 6.5 and 7.3 light-years, respectively (the closest are Alpha Centauri and Barnard’s star). And yet, despite their ubiquity, most people cheap kamagra online canada have never heard of brown dwarfs. Although they lack hydrogen fusion, brown dwarfs do emit light—thermal radiation from the heat within them. They start out relatively hot (around 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit), and over the subsequent billions of years, they cool and dim.

Brown dwarfs cheap kamagra online canada never die. They spend eternity cooling off and fading away. The coldest known brown dwarf checks in at a temperature below the freezing point of water. Because they are so cool, most of the light they emit cheap kamagra online canada is at infrared wavelengths. They are far too faint for the unaided human eye to see in our night sky, but if we could look at them up close, they would probably have a dull orange-red or magenta hue.

In the more than two decades since astronomers began studying brown dwarfs, we have formed a fairly clear picture of their basic characteristics. Like our sun, brown dwarfs are composed almost entirely of hydrogen cheap kamagra online canada. The temperatures in their upper atmospheres are cool enough, however, that a variety of molecules can form. Signatures of water vapor are seen in nearly all brown dwarfs. As they cool further, their atmospheric chemistry changes, and different molecules cheap kamagra online canada and clouds become predominant.

The evolution of a brown dwarf’s atmosphere depends on its mass and age. Imagine a brown dwarf with a mass 40 times that of Jupiter, for instance. For the first 100 million years, it will have an atmospheric composition similar to that of a red dwarf star, with titanium oxide and carbon cheap kamagra online canada monoxide present in the mix. Between 100 million and 500 million years, the atmosphere will cool, and dusty clouds made of minerals such as enstatite and quartz will form. Roughly a billion years after that, the clouds will break up and sink, and methane will become the dominant molecular species in the upper atmosphere.

The coolest known brown dwarf shows evidence of water-ice clouds, as well cheap kamagra online canada as water vapor and methane. We expect its atmosphere to contain significant amounts of ammonia, similar to what we see on Jupiter. Beyond these properties, however, there are many things about brown dwarfs that we do not yet know. The mysterious nature of these objects has inspired some far-fetched ideas cheap kamagra online canada. Brown dwarfs were once considered to be a possible reservoir of dark matter, although this idea was quickly abandoned when it became clear that brown dwarfs emit light (that is, they are not dark) and that their contribution to the total mass of our galaxy is small.

More recently, scientists proposed that life could form in the cool upper regions of brown dwarfs’ atmospheres—an idea that brown dwarf experts quickly squashed because the dynamics are such that any life-form would cycle into deeper layers of the atmosphere that are hot and inhospitable. And then there cheap kamagra online canada was the hoax of the Nibiru cataclysm, a prophesy put forward in 1995 that predicted an imminent, disastrous encounter between Earth and a brown dwarf. Astronomers would be very excited to see a brown dwarf up close, but there is no scientific evidence to support this doomsday scenario, and a brown dwarf would be visible for hundreds or thousands of years prior to any close encounter. The First Brown Dwarfs Scientists predicted brown dwarfs in the 1960s based on what they knew about how stars and planets form. It seemed cheap kamagra online canada that this intermediate category should exist, but astronomers were not finding any such objects in the sky.

It turned out that brown dwarfs are simply very, very faint, and most of the light they emit is infrared. And infrared technology was still in its infancy—just not up to the task. Then came the year 1995, a big cheap kamagra online canada one for astronomy. Astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz found 51 Pegasi b, the first exoplanet known to be orbiting a regular star. Perhaps more important, at least to this highly biased author, the first brown dwarfs were discovered.

Teide 1 cheap kamagra online canada was identified in the famous Pleiades star cluster. Astronomers Rafael Rebolo López, María Rosa Zapatero-Osorio and Eduardo L. Martín first spotted it in optical images from the 0.80-meter telescope at the Teide Observatory in the Canary Islands. The object was young, still cheap kamagra online canada glowing slightly from its formation. The team observed the signatures of several molecules in its atmosphere, including lithium.

Stars usually burn up lithium as soon as they form, so this amazing detection proved that nuclear fusion was not occurring. They published cheap kamagra online canada their finding in September 1995. Credit. Illustration by Ron Miller (objects and atmospheres) and Jen Christiansen (H-R diagram) Two months later astronomers announced the discovery of a second brown dwarf, Gliese 229B, a companion to another star. A group of astronomers at the California Institute of Technology and Johns Hopkins University first saw the object cheap kamagra online canada in an infrared image from the Palomar Observatory.

They immediately knew that it was strange. It had unusual colors and displayed the signature of methane in its atmosphere. Conditions must be very cold for methane to be present because the cheap kamagra online canada highly reactive molecule usually turns into carbon monoxide at higher temperatures. Later observations revealed that the brown dwarf is about the same width as Jupiter, with a diameter of nearly 129,000 kilometers, but much denser, with 70 times as much mass. By the time I started graduate school in 2000, we knew of more brown dwarfs, though not that many.

I was focused on building infrared instruments, and I needed a subject for my cheap kamagra online canada research topic. My Ph.D. Adviser studied star formation, so I decided to search for brown dwarfs in star-forming regions. I ended up discovering a good cheap kamagra online canada number of brown dwarfs in my thesis work, including some that were the first known to have masses putting them near the range of planets. At the time we had no idea how these things formed, and we did not know whether there was a lower-mass threshold, but we started finding smaller and smaller objects.

All in all, my thesis work published fewer than 20 new brown dwarf discoveries, but they made a significant contribution to the total number known. Since then, cheap kamagra online canada new instruments have found many, many more. The main contributors were the 2 Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS), an infrared survey conducted in the early 2000s, and the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), a space telescope launched in 2009. The current tally of brown dwarfs is about 3,000. There are many more to be cheap kamagra online canada found, though—estimates suggest that the Milky Way contains between 25 billion and 100 billion brown dwarfs.

Formation Scenarios As the lowest-mass outcome of the star-formation process, brown dwarfs offer astronomers a unique chance to deepen our understanding of the basic steps involved in the birth of stars and planets. Stars form in complexes of gas (mostly molecular hydrogen) and dust known as molecular clouds. If a molecular cloud contains enough mass, gravity can overcome the gas pressure supporting the cloud and cause it to collapse into cheap kamagra online canada a star. During the collapse, any small amount of rotation in the cloud becomes amplified, much like how ice skaters spin faster when they pull their arms in. This rotation of the cloud material leads to the formation of a circumstellar disk of matter surrounding the nascent star, which then becomes a crucible for planet formation.

When brown dwarfs were first discovered, astronomers assumed they might form in a process similar to that for stars, but they were perplexed as to how the gravity from such a small mass was able to overcome gas pressure and initiate a collapse cheap kamagra online canada. In writing this article, I looked back over some grant and telescope proposals from early in my career, most of which were aimed at better understanding the formation mechanism of brown dwarfs. At the time there were several competing ideas. Some theories involved disrupting the formation of a star before it had reached its final cheap kamagra online canada mass. Perhaps some process physically removed the brown dwarf or burned off its natal environment, leaving behind a miniature star?.

Other hypotheses invoked a scaled-down version of star formation or a scaled-up version of planet formation. This is a lovely example of using cheap kamagra online canada a variety of possible theories to make distinct, testable predictions. As we discovered the ubiquity of circumstellar disks around brown dwarfs, determined the distribution of stellar and brown dwarf masses in a variety of environments, and mapped the orbits of brown dwarfs in binary pairs, it became clear that most brown dwarfs seem to form like scaled-down stars—but from a smaller reservoir of gas. And the fact that brown dwarfs form circumstellar disks raises the tantalizing possibility that they host planets. Although we have never seen any for sure, it is very cheap kamagra online canada likely that planets grow in these disks just as they do around stars.

Scientists hope the coming years will finally see the confirmed discovery of worlds orbiting brown dwarfs. Recently researchers discovered isolated brown dwarfs with masses similar to those of giant planets (less than 13 times the mass of Jupiter), which again raised the question of how they might have formed. Could some of these planetary-mass brown dwarfs have arisen in the circumstellar disks of more massive stars—in other words, formed just cheap kamagra online canada as planets do?. To test the mechanism for the formation of planetlike masses, my colleagues and I proposed a survey with the Hubble Space Telescope. Because Hubble is in orbit, it avoids the smearing and absorption of light by Earth’s atmosphere, which makes it ideal for imaging binary pairs of brown dwarfs.

Through this survey, in 2020 cheap kamagra online canada we discovered a unique system of brown dwarfs that strongly supports a starlike-formation mechanism for planetlike masses. The system, Oph 98 AB, is very young in cosmic terms (three million years old), and its two components weigh in at 15 and eight times the mass of Jupiter. These extremely low-mass objects are separated by 200 times the distance between Earth and the sun. Because Oph 98 A and B are cheap kamagra online canada so light and so widely separated, the system has the lowest gravitational binding energy of any known binary pair. The weak binding energy means that these bodies must have formed in their current orientation, rather than originating elsewhere and later becoming a pair, which points to a starlike-formation mechanism.

And the young age of the system (yes, we consider three million years young!. ) means that planetary-mass cheap kamagra online canada objects apparently do not take any longer to form than stars. New Insights Brown dwarf science has now reached a stage where we are able to make more precise measurements and ask more detailed questions than ever before about these still mysterious objects. Among the most interesting recent discoveries are the coldest brown dwarfs, known as Y dwarfs. These objects have cheap kamagra online canada temperatures ranging from 350 degrees F down to –10 degrees F.

I love to joke when working on Y dwarfs that I am studying the coolest systems in the galaxy!. Though not quite as cold as Jupiter (–234 degrees F), these Y dwarfs have enabled us to make the first meaningful comparison between brown dwarfs and the atmospheres of the giant planets in our solar system. Y dwarfs are difficult to observe cheap kamagra online canada because they are both cool and very dim. The light they do emit is predominantly in the infrared range, at wavelengths of three to five microns, where Earth’s atmosphere makes observations difficult. Regardless, my colleagues and I have published spectra of several Y dwarfs and used theoretical models to infer the presence of water-ice clouds, as well as a significant amount of vertical mixing in the atmosphere.

In this same wavelength range, Jupiter emits its own light (rather than just reflecting the cheap kamagra online canada light of our sun) and shows significant vertical mixing as well. Our hope is that by studying Y dwarfs, we will be able to disentangle properties of Jupiter that come from its planetary nature—in other words, the fact that it formed in the circumstellar disk of our sun and is constantly illuminated by sunlight—and properties that may be ubiquitous among cool gaseous objects, be they planets, exoplanets or brown dwarfs. Thus far our studies are showing that highly dynamic atmospheres tend to be the norm. These insights about brown dwarf atmospheres have led to a cheap kamagra online canada new subfield. Exometeorology.

Although brown dwarfs are too far away for us to visually examine their atmospheric features, we can see their imprint through changes in brightness. As a cloud or other feature rotates in and out cheap kamagra online canada of view, it changes the light coming from the brown dwarf. Astronomers have analyzed the brightness variations of brown dwarfs over many rotations and have created maps of their spots and bands, which look remarkably like the familiar stripes and storms on the giant planets in our own solar system. Some brown dwarfs have been found to change in brightness by up to 25 percent over one rotation. The results of these studies are leading us to better understand atmospheric processes more generally—we have found that brown dwarfs with temperatures at which clouds break up show large variations in brightness and that young objects tend to show greater variability cheap kamagra online canada in brightness.

Scientists have also discovered other similarities between brown dwarfs and gas giants. Both, for example, tend to have strong magnetic fields and aurorae, as revealed by radio observations of the signatures of charged particles spiraling in their magnetic fields. The measured magnetic field strengths for brown dwarfs are 1,000 times stronger than Jupiter’s magnetic field cheap kamagra online canada and 10,000 times stronger than Earth’s. I like to imagine what the night sky might look like from one of these brown dwarfs—given the beauty of Earth’s aurora borealis, it would likely be a spectacular sight. Recently a student’s question prompted another project to examine how the atmospheres on brown dwarfs compare with those on planets.

When I teach courses in introductory astronomy, we cover the planets of the cheap kamagra online canada solar system (and of course, I sprinkle in a lot of information about brown dwarfs as well). A tidbit I present is that the length of a Jovian day depends on how you measure it. If you clock the motion of visible features in Jupiter’s equatorial region, you measure a rotation period that is five minutes shorter than the rotation period measured in the radio signal, which probes its interior rotation. A student asked me why this difference cheap kamagra online canada in rotation period occurs, and I replied that it was because Jupiter’s equatorial features are pushed along by strong zonal winds. The winds on Earth are driven by the redistribution of solar energy, but we are not sure to what degree this applies to Jupiter’s winds.

After the lecture, I started thinking about this further. Astronomers have measured radio emission in brown dwarfs, cheap kamagra online canada which occurs via the same mechanism as Jupiter’s radio emission, so we can measure an interior rotation period. And we can use our method of monitoring brightness changes to measure the atmosphere’s rotation period. Thus, I hatched an idea to measure the wind speed on a brown dwarf for the first time. The best candidate we had to try cheap kamagra online canada out the technique was a methane brown dwarf with confirmed radio emission.

To determine the wind speed, we would need to measure both periods to a precision of less than 30 seconds. My colleagues and I submitted a proposal to use the Spitzer Space Telescope to measure the brown dwarf’s brightness variations and applied to use the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in New Mexico to measure a cheap kamagra online canada more precise radio period. It still feels like a small miracle that our measurements revealed a period difference of just more than a minute, which equates to a wind speed of 2,300 kilometers per hour. We published our findings last year in the journal Science.

This high wind speed on an isolated brown dwarf cheap kamagra online canada means that atmospheric winds are not always driven by the redistribution of solar energy, leaving open the question of whether Jupiter’s winds are driven by the sun. Astronomers continue to search for more brown dwarfs. Some surveys focus on identifying large samples of brown dwarfs via deep imaging surveys of the whole sky such as 2MASS, WISE, and the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS). Citizen scientists have also become involved in the search through projects such as Backyard Worlds, which allows cheap kamagra online canada anyone to examine WISE data for signs of brown dwarfs and other moving objects. We expect that upcoming large surveys with the Vera C.

Rubin Observatory (due to begin observing early next year) and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (launching in 2025) will work to further complete our census of brown dwarfs. Sadly, we cheap kamagra online canada could not get funding for the telescope on Cerro Toco, and it was never built. But once the James Webb Space Telescope is launched later this year, astronomers will have an unprecedented look at brown dwarfs in the infrared, without interference from Earth’s atmosphere. The first cycle of observations planned includes programs to study the atmospheric chemistry of Y dwarfs and the cloud composition of dusty brown dwarfs and even a search for planetary systems around brown dwarfs. Exciting times are certainly ahead for those of us who study some of the cosmos’s most overlooked objects.California resident Mark Brown knows too well the danger that climate change poses cheap kamagra online canada to the West.

A former fire team chief, Brown in 2018 responded to the Camp Fire blaze, California's deadliest wildfire. At least 85 people were killed in the multibillion-dollar disaster, including four victims who died in their cars trying to escape and a fifth person who perished in a desperate run for safety. Brown's now working to cheap kamagra online canada ensure that horror doesn't repeat itself. As an executive officer with the Marin Wildfire Prevention Authority, Brown is helping to reduce the risk of wildfire and plan for survival if one erupts. Of note are agency efforts to develop evacuation maps and remove flammable vegetation alongside key routes — all to prevent residents from dying as they try and get away.

"We need to make our evacuation routes survivable in a traffic jam, so that even if [people] are caught in a traffic jam, they can stay in their car and they can survive in their car," said Brown, 52, retired deputy chief of the Marin cheap kamagra online canada County Fire Department. That's safer, he said, "than having to get out of the car and flee, and then get caught, and have no protection at all." It's part of a shift in the Golden State, where deadly and destructive fires have hit repeatedly over the last decade. Cities, counties and individuals are planning both to prevent fires, and to make sure people survive when blazes start. Because with climate change, fires burn cheap kamagra online canada hotter and faster. Fleeing for safety increasingly is the only choice.

"People are realizing that the wildfires of today, the rate they're burning, the damage they're doing, the severity of them is not the type of wildfires that we saw 10-20-30 years ago," said Daniel Berlant, assistant deputy director at the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire. "People really are understanding that their cheap kamagra online canada life is on the line. They can't wait it out, or just use their garden hose." The emphasis on evacuations may have saved lives this summer. California is now battling the second-largest wildfire in state history — the Dixie Fire — yet so far there are no known fatalities. That's in spite of the cheap kamagra online canada fact Dixie has burned more than 500,000 acres, destroyed a historic downtown and remains mostly out of control in a rural area about 90 miles northeast of Chico, Calif.

Officials credited planning that started years earlier, a community meeting on fire preparedness in May and people's willingness to leave when evacuations started. €œMost people, particularly in this part of the state of California ... The remote areas, timbered areas, are aware of what happened in the Camp Fire and also the [2020] North Complex [Fire], and many other areas in the last few years," said Carson Wingfield, incident commander at the Dixie Fire's Emergency Operations Center, "So when we come through and we're asking cheap kamagra online canada them to go ... They'll go, usually." State and local emergency officials said they hope a transformation is underway, as California confronts heightened wildfire risk. Cal Fire and the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES) are pressing local authorities to plan more aggressively for extreme fires.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency over the last five fiscal years has given roughly $62 million in hazard planning and prevention assistance money, cheap kamagra online canada which Cal OES has passed through as grants. To be sure, prevention remains a top priority, and the state has spent billions of dollars in that area. But there's also a growing acceptance that some fires amplified by climate change are too ferocious to risk not evacuating. "These are fires that are burning at record speeds, with flame cheap kamagra online canada length sometimes hundreds of feet high, that are like a freight train," Berlant said. "Even our own firefighters, with the best equipment, the best training and experience on their side, we're challenged to fight and to stop these fires against the weather conditions we're experiencing.

"We have seen a lot more people, I think, evacuated areas that maybe 10 years ago would have been a lot harder to get them to leave their homes," he added. Deadly Camp Fire motivates action cheap kamagra online canada While state and local authorities for decades have done emergency planning, the 2018 Camp Fire, in the Sierra Nevada foothills, created somewhat of a dividing line in people's outlook, several experts said. That fire gutted the town of Paradise, about 90 miles north of Sacramento. Claudine Jaenichen, a consultant who's worked with 24 cities to draw up emergency evacuation maps, said the Camp Fire heightened many people's awareness about where they live and their potential escape routes. Residents living where Dixie is burning — in Butte, Plumas and Tehama counties — feel the fear cheap kamagra online canada of fire with a particular resonance, several said.

The area is about 80 miles northeast of Paradise. Many Plumas County residents knew people in Paradise, went there to get groceries or had driven through on their way to Chico, said Brian Ferguson, spokesman with Cal OES. The North Complex cheap kamagra online canada Fire, also in the region, last year killed 16 people. Cal OES oversees emergency plans each county must develop. Since the Camp Fire, the state has emphasized getting counties to scrutinize and maintain those plans.

Ferguson said identifying roads used for evacuations "is certainly a point cheap kamagra online canada of emphasis that's been made." Wingfield cautioned that the lack of fatalities so far in the Dixie Fire is a "transient” number. There's still the possibility of finding a death after the fire is extinguished, he said, though no residents are unaccounted for right now. The region where Dixie is burning also is sparsely populated, and that helped get people out. Quincy, where Plumas County government is located, has a population of fewer than 2,000 cheap kamagra online canada people. The total county population is about 19,000.

In evacuations for the Dixie Fire, Plumas County sheriff's deputies "tried to go and knock on every door and verify that we've gone back to every resident," Wingfield said. That's not possible in more populated cheap kamagra online canada areas. So some California cities are incorporating a new type of warning system. A European hi-lo siren to alert residents. Legislation that passed last year allowed its use, which cheap kamagra online canada had been prohibited.

The state in 2019 also streamlined its evacuation alert system. Previously there were three tiers. Evacuation warning, voluntary evacuations cheap kamagra online canada and mandatory evacuations. Now there are just two. Evacuation warning and evacuation orders.

"The 'voluntary evacuation' moniker was often challenging for the public to interpret, and slowed response times," Ferguson with Cal OES wrote in cheap kamagra online canada an email. Cities and counties are crafting plans to help people escape. Jaenichen, the consultant who's worked with 24 cities on evacuation maps, said she emphasizes the importance of making sure residents are given the information in multiple formats. For example, the cities she works cheap kamagra online canada with create QR codes that people scan with cellphones to get the information. That helps track how many people access it.

Residents tax themselves for fire work Jaenichen worked with Marin County, the San Francisco-area region where Brown lives. The county last year put cheap kamagra online canada a measure on the ballot to fund the Marin Wildfire Prevention Authority. Residents agreed to tax themselves 10 cents per square foot of building space they own for the effort. It's expected to generate about $20 million annually for a decade for fire prevention and evacuation work. About 240,000 people live in the 17 cheap kamagra online canada cities, towns and districts that are part of the Marin Wildfire Prevention Authority’s work.

Jaenichen also worked with Laguna Beach, in Orange County, between San Diego and Los Angeles. The coastal city is the site of one of the most destructive fires in U.S. History. In 1993, fire there consumed 441 homes. It forced the evacuation of 23,000 people.

Nearly all of Laguna Beach is considered a "Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone" by Cal Fire. Moreover, there are only three ways in and out of the beach town. The Laguna Beach City Council in late 2018 — not long after the Camp Fire — created a Wildfire Mitigation and Fire Safety Subcommittee to analyze risk. The council since has approved several mitigation measures. Those moves include cutting back more vegetation and expanding the city's outdoor warning system — 21 speakers installed around town.

The city also spent more than $197,000 for a study that analyzed how long it would take to evacuate all its residents. The analysis gave estimates for getting people out under various conditions, such as night or day, winter or summer, and weekend or weekday. In the best-case scenario, with no roadway hazards or closures or smoke limiting driver vision, it would take four hours and 20 minutes to evacuate the city of all its 23,000 residents, the study said. Closure of major roads could nearly double that time. The city plans to use the results "to update evacuation plans, install evacuation route signage, pre-stage traffic management supplies, and conduct community outreach and education," Cassie Walder, a spokeswoman for the city, wrote in an email.

Nearby in Irvine, officials did similar planning. The city of 273,000 analyzed potential wildfire spread as part of its preparation, said Casey George, the city's open space administrator. Irvine drew up a citywide evacuation plan. "We put each part of the city into zones, and each zone has an average number of residents, vehicles and so on," George said. There's an emergency alert that sends the information to cellphones, so residents "click on that link, and it will show that [evacuation] route that they should take." Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC.

Copyright 2021. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.“In nature nothing exists alone,” wrote Rachel Carson in her 1962 book Silent Spring. She warned that pesticides absorbed by soil run into streams, rivers and reservoirs unnoticed, poisoning living creatures along the way. Carson ignited the modern environmental movement by showing that stewardship of the living earth begins with simple attention. Her task would likely have been far easier if people could see this interconnected life up close.A lot has changed since then.

Glowing tardigrade muscles, erectile dysfunction s in bat brain cells, a thrilling flight through a seven-day-old chicken embryo’s nervous system—such otherwise invisible small worlds pulse with energy, undeniably alive. Now in its 11th year, Nikon’s Small World in Motion competition has made these phenomena, and more, visible—collected from microscopes around the world. The first-place winner this year, amateur microscopist Fabian J. Weston in Pennant Hills, Australia, captured the symbiotic relationship between termites and the single-celled microorganisms found inside them. Within the insects’ gut, these microbes, called protists, help them digest the cellulose—the main component of plants’ cell walls—that they eat and cycle carbon back into the soil.

€œThere is a significant gap in our understanding about these termite symbionts and how this unique evolutionary relationship developed with its host, making it well worth exploring and presenting,” Weston told the competition organizers. He hopes the final result will bring greater public awareness to the role that all protists play in every ecosystem on earth. To capture the video, Weston used a research microscope from the 1970s and polarized light. The final result took months of trial and error and minute changes to the pH, chemical composition and temperature of the termites’ environment tokeep both the insects and the protists inside them alive. The second-place winners, molecular biologists Stephanie Hachey and Christopher Hughes, both at the University of California, Irvine, shot a time-lapse video of an engineered human micro tumor forming and metastasizing, with images taken every 15 minutes for 10 consecutive days.

The 2021 winners and honorable mentions explored wildly distinct tiny corners of the universe that were magnified by up to 120 times. In each case, it’s impossible to ignore the thrumming vitality seen beneath the surface.As scientists and engineers, we feel privileged to have careers that contribute to the progress of knowledge and understanding. The rewards of participating in research and discovery and of mentoring emerging scientists are immense. Science itself is an extraordinary and essential institution. It continues to thrive after centuries of human ingenuity and effort, and to provide significant advancements for societal well-being in areas such as understanding and mitigating global environmental change, achieving innovations for improving public health, and creating technological solutions to widespread societal challenges.

However, science does not happen in a vacuum. It is a social process and therefore exhibits cultural norms and social patterns that affect scientific practices and outcomes. Opportunities and entryways into STEM careers are unequally available to all members of our society, with the result that the practice of science is limited demographically. Further, the benefits of the scientific enterprise have disproportionately benefited members of the upper echelons, and the scientific enterprise has too often been aligned with injustices that reinforce the oppression of the racially disenfranchised, women and LGBTQ communities. Finally, the culture of science has evolved in ways that reinforce its image as a career path that is unwelcoming to socially subordinated groups.

When budding scientists first enter the discipline, it is usually because we are inspired by curiosity, passionate about understanding the natural world and/or eager to contribute to a better society. We don’t typically know much about the culture of science at first. And we certainly do not realize the enormous historical legacy nor the social and power dynamics of the science ecosystem we are becoming a part of. We begin our careers in a focused disciplinary area, and we very slowly learn how to navigate the science system, the idiosyncrasies of the academy and the requirements for success in a STEM career. Not everyone who enters stays.

Looked at as a whole, the scientific enterprise comprises a system of people, ideas, projects, resources, norms and institutions. A “science of science” approach effectively highlights the deep interconnectedness between scientists, knowledge creation and knowledge, but it requires more study regarding the links between the diversity or lack of diversity of scientists and knowledge outcomes. This is because those who participate in science are not at all reflective of our society. African Americans, Latinos, American Indians and other racially disenfranchised persons represent only about 9 percent of STEM academic positions in the United States, and that number has barely grown over four decades. This percentage is in sharp contrast to the changing demography in the U.S.

Women (primarily white women) now earn approximately 41% of STEM doctorate degrees and have increased their share of STEM academic positions to approximately 39% but are not at parity with men especially at higher career positions. Attrition of female scientists increases as they move up the career ladder, with a 19.5% higher dropout rate over male scientists. Meanwhile, calls for broadening participation in STEM fields are increasing and many investments in excellent programs aimed at advancing STEM diversity, equity and inclusion have been made. Thus far, the majority of efforts have been directed at increasing entry opportunities and training a diverse STEM workforce. So-called “pipeline interventions.” So why has meaningful progress been so slow?.

The long answer involves a clear-eyed view of obstacles to equity (especially systemic racism and sexism in our society and therefore our science system), overrepresentation of a narrow demographic in STEM, outdated but entrenched leadership models, uniquely imbalanced and potentially harmful power dynamics in the academy, and many other issues. The short answer?. It’s the system, not the participants. This means that we should be focusing more of our efforts on systemic reform for the future of science. The current culture of our science system is an anachronism in today’s world and must change with the times.

Today’s system remains rooted in norms and practices that were established decades ago by and for a narrow subset of society. Criteria for entry and advancement, definitions of excellence and success, institutional policies and values, and the incentive systems that determine STEM career trajectories all require a reboot if we are to diversify the system beyond the relatively unencumbered and advantaged members of society. This is becoming increasingly clear via surveys of the scientific community as well. To its participants, our science system is increasingly perceived as highly competitive, aggressive, demographically exclusionary and still jarringly reflective of its historical roots in a Eurocentric, white, patriarchal society. To be a “successful” scientist today, one must follow a fairly predictable track up the career ladder that is increasingly competitive, monetized and metricized — raising the question whether we have come to a place where we value what we can measure rather than measure what we should value.

One must continually compete for research funding, and one’s advancement, promotion and credibility are linked to how much grant funding is brought into one’s institution. This model can be even more challenging for scientists from racially disenfranchised groups and for women because of social and family pressures that may affect them differently, especially in early career stages. Also, research shows that women and racial minorities in STEM often wish to pursue scientific questions that are different from those of the socially dominant community of scientists. The pressure to obtain research dollars is matched only by the pressure to publish research findings as quickly and as often as possible in the ‘highest-impact’ journals, and to increase the number of citations your publications attract (measured by various widely utilized performance metrics). Like research funding, the publish-or-perish treadmill also suffers from the question of what is most interesting to those in power in the science system.

And our peer review system – depending on how it is implemented – suffers from explicit and implicit biases. Driven by metric-based criteria for recognition and promotion, thre prevalent transactional models of leadership in STEM do not select for a diverse, collaborative workforce. Self-promotion is also a required skill in this environment. To succeed, one should be marketing oneself and garnering as much social media attention as possible (measured by Altmetric Attention scores and other indices). It’s obvious where this road can lead in terms of science quality and the social dynamics of vying for attention.

In addition, subordinated groups in science are not as visible to the science press as are the dominant groups, and they are not perceived as the faces of science thought leadership. At times, social attention for scholars of color and for women may result in negative attention and/or retribution. see the recent case of Pulitzer Prize–winner Nikole Hannah-Jones, author of the New York Times’ 1619 Project, and the associated UNC tenure controversy. The established measures of success select for highly competitive rather than collaborative environments. A STEM workforce lacking diversity.

A narrow demographic at the top. A style of mentoring that elevates the success of mentors more than that of mentees. And potentially harmful environments for groups underrepresented in science. For example, a recent report on sexual harassment in STEM issued by the National Academy of Sciences reports that academic science is second only to the military in rates of gender harassment, taking an astonishing and corrosive toll on women who enter STEM fields. Minority scientists, who are too often unrepresented in scientific departments, are immersed in unwelcoming environments and historically not given credit for their research contributions.

Given this state of affairs, the failure to “move the needle” on diversity, equity and inclusion in STEM seems not only understandable but inevitable. Even if successful in their fields, these dynamics can present a gauntlet of stressful hazards to the personal well-being of scientists. The toll is also seen in the harm done to institutional reputations when the behavior of some scholars becomes public. So, why should we all care about this?. Isn’t science progressing faster all the time?.

Isn’t the rate of research publications steadily increasing?. Don’t many foreign scientists come to the U.S. To work in our first-class science system?. Well, yes, all true—but creating systemic culture change in STEM in order to diversify the STEM workforce matters critically for the future advancement of science and the translation of its benefits to society. True diversity, equity and inclusion within the scientific community will have a major positive impact for addressing the increasingly complex issues that lie at the heart of the science-society-policy intersection.

It matters significantly – arguably more than any other issue – for the future of science. It matters because scientific conclusions are shaped by the kinds of questions asked, by who conducts research, and by who asks scientific questions (e.g., do health trials include all demographic sectors of society?. ). It matters because research demonstrates that better science outcomes, enhanced innovation, and increased creativity result from broader perspectives and diverse participants (e.g., are diverse viewpoints at the innovation tables?. ).

It matters because research priorities that determine who benefits from science and technological advances are set differently by different identities in science (e.g., are technological advances considering impacts on all communities?. ). It matters because the vital link between scientific outcomes and evidence-based public policy relies on public trust in science—and public trust in science in turn relies on full participation, engagement and representativeness in science. And finally, it matters because the scientific enterprise in the U.S. Is funded largely by the public and should therefore include and benefit the entire public.

Our science system is supported by societal investments, the so-called “Science Bargain” or “Science-Society Contract.” Many in science are unaware of a 1945 report called Science. The Endless Frontier, but that report was a landmark policy document for government (public) support of science in this nation. The report was published at the end of World War II by Vannevar Bush, director of the federal Office of Scientific Research and Development at the time. Bush argued that government spending on university-based and research institution–based science during the war effort should be continued in our postwar society but redirected to the nation’s scientists who were pursuing basic research at our top universities. Thus, research universities and the federal government (and thereby the U.S.

Public) entered into an implicit partnership, with the shared goal of stimulating knowledge generation in the service of society. It seems obvious that, because the public underwrites the scientific effort in the U.S., the entire public deserves to fully participate in the system and to fully benefit from its advances. But that part of the vision remains unrealized at this moment in time. And, if none of those arguments (societally relevant science, more innovative science, more representative science, enhanced public trust in science, financially responsible science) are persuasive, then transforming our science system towards a more just, equitable and inclusive enterprise is still imperative—because it is the morally right thing to do. In the current social context of renewed attention to addressing societal inequities and injustices across many of our American institutions, we cannot leave a science reckoning out of the mix.

Science, too, is a social justice issue. A healthy debate regarding the historical inequities of the science system is already underway. Who gets to participate in science?. Who benefits from it?. Who is sometimes harmed by it?.

Who sets the important research priorities?. When viewed through a social justice lens, the deep misalignment between societal demographics and practicing scientists today is clearly even more unsustainable. The goal, then, is to build a STEM culture of inclusivity and a more representative science that becomes normative through a coordinated, systemic transformation. We have a unique opportunity to transform the current science paradigm given the social and political times we live in and given that the system is already recently disrupted. To succeed, long-entrenched obstacles to this vision will need to be dismantled.

the aforementioned culture of science is one such obstacle. But there is much more. Inequity in educational opportunity. Myths of meritocracy. Oversimplified metrics for success.

Entrenched legacy attitudes about excellence, competition and the faces of leadership. Career advancement and tenure criteria that do not necessarily align with the values of diverse stakeholders. Unwelcoming or hostile work environments in classroom, laboratory and fieldwork. And more. In a sense, reforming our science system is both simple and complicated.

Simple in the sense that we just need the political will to transform. Complicated in the sense that we are seeking to transform a complex and highly interconnected system with reinforcing feedback dynamics yet many disconnected components. These components include STEM educational systems, higher education, academic institutions, scientific disciplines and professional societies, individual scientists, science policies, the science publishing industry, research funding agencies, and more. All these components must coordinate and align for significant systemic change to occur. For example, increasing diversity of the STEM pipeline and those at early career stages will not ultimately be successful if the culture of academic institutions does not change to accommodate the lives of diverse participants or if bias keeps them marginalized or drives them out of the system.

Because advancing equity, diversity and inclusion in the scientific enterprise is therefore a systems-based challenge, it will require a more coordinated and centralized effort that includes all the embedded components working together towards common goals. Although complex and challenging, such an undertaking will be more than worth the effort. With enormous challenges and possibilities in front of us, science needs all hands on deck. Let’s create a science system that is by all and for all, adjust the course of the astonishing human history of science towards a more just and inclusive enterprise, and fulfill a more complete vision of the science-society bargain. This is an opinion and analysis article.

The views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American. Any opinion, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or United States government, the AAAS, or any of the authors’ home institutions.Simple mathematical concepts such as counting appear to be firmly anchored in the natural process of thinking. Studies have shown that even very young children and animals possess such skills to a certain extent. This is hardly surprising because counting is extremely useful in terms of evolution. For example, it is required for even very simple forms of trading.

And counting helps in estimating the size of a hostile group and, accordingly, whether it is better to attack or retreat.Over the past millennia, humans have developed a remarkable notion of counting. Originally applied to a handful of objects, it was easily extended to vastly different orders of magnitude. Soon a mathematical framework emerged that could be used to describe huge quantities, such as the distance between galaxies or the number of elementary particles in the universe, as well as barely conceivable distances in the microcosm, between atoms or quarks.We can even work with numbers that go beyond anything currently known to be relevant in describing the universe. For example, the number 1010100 (one followed by 10100 zeros, with 10100 representing one followed by 100 zeros) can be written down and used in all kinds of calculations. Writing this number in ordinary decimal notation, however, would require more elementary particles than are probably contained in the universe, even employing just one particle per digit.

Physicists estimate that our cosmos contains fewer than 10100 particles. Yet even such unimaginably large numbers are vanishingly small, compared with infinite sets, which have played an important role in mathematics for more than 100 years. Simply counting objects gives rise to the set of natural numbers, ℕ = {0, 1, 2, 3, …}, which many of us encounter in school. Yet even this seemingly simple concept poses a challenge. There is no largest natural number.

If you keep counting, you will always be able to find a larger number. Can there actually be such a thing as an infinite set?. In the 19th century, this question was very controversial. In philosophy, this may still be the case. But in modern mathematics, the existence of infinite sets is simply assumed to be true—postulated as an axiom that does not require proof.Set theory is about more than describing sets.

Just as, in arithmetic, you learn to apply arithmetical operations to numbers—for example, addition or multiplication—you can also define set-theoretical operations that generate new sets from given ones. You can take unions—{1, 2} and {2, 3, 4} becomes {1, 2, 3, 4}—or intersections—{1, 2} and {2, 3, 4} becomes {2}. More excitingly, you can form power sets—the family of all subsets of a set.Comparing Set SizesThe power set P(X) of a set X can be easily calculated for small X. For instance, {1, 2} gives you P({1,2}) = {{}, {1}, {2}, {1, 2}}. But P(X) grows rapidly for larger X.

For example, every 10-element set has 210 = 1,024 subsets. If you really want to challenge your imagination, try forming the power set of an infinite set. For example, the power set of the natural numbers, P(ℕ), contains the empty set, ℕ itself, the set of all even numbers, the prime numbers, the set of all numbers with the sum of digits totaling 2021, {12, 17}, and much, much more. As it turns out, the number of elements of this power set exceeds the number of elements in the set of natural numbers.To understand what that means, you first have to understand how the size of sets is defined. For the finite case, you can count the respective elements.

For instance, {1, 2, 3} and {Cantor, Gödel, Cohen} are of the same size. If you wish to compare sets with numerous (but finitely many) elements, there are two well-established methods. One possibility is to count the objects contained in each set and compare the numbers. Sometimes, however, it is easier to match the elements of one set to another. Then two sets are of the same size if and only if each element of one set can be uniquely paired with an element of the other set (in our example.

1 → Cantor, 2 →Gödel, 3 →Cohen).This pairing method also works for infinite sets. Here, instead of first counting and then deriving concepts such as “greater than” or “equal to,” you follow a reverse strategy. You start with defining what it means that two sets, A and B, are of the same size—namely, there is a mapping that pairs each element of A with exactly one element of B (so that no element of B is left over). Such a mapping is called bijection.Similarly, A is defined to be less than or equal to B if there is a mapping from A to B that uses each element of B once at most.After we have these notions, the size of sets is denoted by cardinal numbers, or cardinals. For finite sets, these are the usual natural numbers.

But for infinite sets, they are abstract quantities that just capture the notion of “size.” For example, “countable” is the cardinal number of the natural numbers (and therefore of every set that has the same size as the natural numbers). It turns out that there are different cardinals. That is, there are infinite sets A and B with no bijection between them.At first sight, this definition of size seems to lead to contradictions, which were elaborated by the Bohemian mathematician Bernard Bolzano in Paradoxes of the Infinite, published posthumously in 1851. For example, Euclid’s “The whole is greater than the part” appears self-evident. That means if a set A is a proper subset of B (that is, every element of A is in B, but B contains additional elements), then A must be smaller than B.

This assertion is not true for infinite sets, however!. This curious property is one reason some scholars rejected the concept of infinite sets more than 100 years ago.For example, the set of even numbers E = {0, 2, 4, 6, …} is a proper subset of the natural numbers ℕ = {0, 1, 2, …}. Intuitively, you might think that the set E is half the size of ℕ. But in fact, based on our definition, the sets have the same size because each number n in E can be assigned to exactly one number in ℕ (0 →0, 2 →1, 4 →2, …, n →n/2, …).Consequently, the concept of “size” for sets could be dismissed as nonsensical. Alternatively, it could be termed something else.

Cardinality, for example. For the sake of simplicity, we will stick to the conventional terminology, even though it has unexpected consequences at infinity.In the late 1800s, German logician Georg Cantor, founder of modern set theory, discovered that not all infinite sets are equal. According to his proof, the power set P(X) of a (finite or infinite) set X is always larger than X itself. Among other things, it follows that there is no largest infinity and thus no “set of all sets.” An Unresolved Hypothesis There is, however, something akin to a smallest infinity. All infinite sets are greater than or equal to the natural numbers.

Sets X that have the same size as ℕ (with a bijection between ℕ and X) are called countable. Their cardinality is denoted ℵ0, or aleph null. For every infinite cardinal ℵa, there is a next larger cardinal number ℵa+1. Thus, the smallest infinite cardinal ℵ0 is followed by ℵ1, then ℵ2 and so on. The set ℝ of real numbers (also called the real line) is as large as the power set of ℕ, and this cardinality is denoted 2ℵ0, or “continuum.”In the 1870s, Cantor ruminated over whether the size of ℝ was the smallest possible cardinal above ℵ0—in other words, whether ℵ1 = 2ℵ0.

Previously, every infinite subset of ℝ that had been studied had turned out to be either as large as ℕ or ℝ itself. This led Cantor to what is known as the continuum hypothesis (CH). The assertion that the size of ℝ is the smallest possible uncountable cardinal. For decades, CH kept mathematicians busy, but a proof eluded them. Later, it became clear their efforts had been doomed from the start.Set theory is extremely powerful.

It can describe virtually all mathematical concepts. But it also has limitations. The field is based on the axiomatic system formulated more than 100 years ago by German logician Ernst Zermelo and elaborated by his German-Israeli colleague Abraham Fraenkel. Called ZFC, or Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory (C stands for “axiom of choice”), the system is a collection of basic assumptions sufficient to carry out almost all of mathematics. Very few problems require additional assumptions.

But in 1931 Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel recognized that the system has a fundamental defect. It is incomplete. That is, it is possible to formulate mathematical statements that can neither be refuted nor proved using ZFC. Among other things, it is impossible for a system to prove its own consistency.The most famous example of undecidability in set theory is CH. In a paper published in 1938, Gödel proved that CH cannot be disproved within ZFC.

Neither can it be proved, as Paul Cohen showed 25 years later. It is thus impossible to solve CH using the usual axioms of set theory. Consequently, it remains unclear whether sets exist that are both larger than the natural numbers and smaller than the real numbers.Cardinality is not the only notion to describe the size of a set. For example, from the point of view of geometry, subsets of the real line ℝ, the two-dimensional plane (sometimes called the x-y plane) or the three-dimensional space can be assigned length, area or volume. A set of points in the plane forming a rectangle with side lengths a and b has an area of a ∙b.

Calculating the area of more complicated subsets of the plane sometimes requires other tools, such as the integral calculus taught in school. This method does not suffice for certain complex sets. But many can still be quantified using the Lebesgue measure, a function that assigns length, area or volume to extremely complicated objects. Even so, it is possible to define subsets of ℝ, or the plane, that are so frayed that they cannot be measured at all.In two-dimensional space, a line (such as the circumference of a circle, a finite segment or a straight line) is always measurable, and its area is zero. It is therefore called a null set.

Null sets can also be defined in one dimension. On the real line, the set with two elements—for example {3, 5}—has a measure zero, whereas an interval such as [3, 5]—that is, the real numbers between three and five—has a measure two. Negligible Sets The concept of a null set is extremely useful in mathematics. Often, a theorem is not true for all real numbers but can be proved for all real numbers outside of a null set. This is usually good enough for most applications.

Yet null sets may seem quite large. For example, the rational numbers within the real line are a null set even though there are infinitely many of them. This is because any countable—or finite—set is a null set. The converse is not true. A subset of the x-y plane with a large cardinality need be neither measurable nor of large measure.

For example, the entire plane with its 2ℵ0 elements has an infinite measure. But the x axis with the same cardinality has a two-dimensional measure (or “area”) zero and thus is a null set of the plane. Such “negligible” sets led to fundamental questions about the size of 10 infinite cardinals, which remained unanswered for a long time. For example, mathematicians wished to know the minimum size a set must have for it not to be a null set. The family of all null sets is denoted by 𝒩, and the smallest cardinality of a non-null set is denoted by non(𝒩).

It follows that ℵ0 <. Non(𝒩) ≤ 2ℵ0, because any set of size ℵ0 is a null set, and the whole plane has size 2ℵ0 and is not a null set. Thus, ℵ1≤ non(𝒩) ≤ 2ℵ0, because ℵ1 is the smallest uncountable cardinal. If we assume CH, then non(𝒩) = 2ℵ0, because, in that case, ℵ1 = 2ℵ0. We can define another cardinal number, add(𝒩), to answer the question, What is the minimal number of null sets whose union is a non-null set?.

This number is less than or equal to non(𝒩). If A is a non-null set containing non(𝒩) many elements, the union of all the non(𝒩) many one-element subsets of A is the non-null set A. But a smaller number of null sets (though they would not be one-element sets) could also satisfy the requirements. Therefore, add(𝒩) ≤ non(𝒩) holds. The cardinal cov(𝒩) is the smallest number of null sets whose union yields the whole plane.

It is also easy to see that add(𝒩) is smaller than or equal to cov(𝒩) because, as already mentioned, the plane is a non-null set. We can also consider cof(𝒩), the smallest possible size for a basis X of 𝒩. That is, a set X of null sets that contains a superset B of every null set A. (That means A is a subset of B.) These infinite cardinals—add(𝒩), cov(𝒩), non(𝒩) and cof(𝒩)—are important characteristics of the family of null sets. For each of these four cardinal characteristics, an analogous characteristic can be defined using a different concept of small, or negligible, sets.

This other notion of smallness is “meager.” A meager set is a set contained in the countable union of nowhere dense sets, such as the circumference of a circle in the plane, or finitely or countably many such circumferences. In one dimension, the normal numbers form a meager set on the real line, while the remaining reals, the non-normal numbers, constitute a null set. Accordingly, the corresponding cardinal characteristics can be defined for the family of meager sets. Add(ℳ), non(ℳ), cov(ℳ) and cof(ℳ). Under CH, all characteristics are the same, namely ℵ1, for both null and meager sets.

On the other hand, using the method of “forcing,” developed by Cohen, mathematicians Kenneth Kunen and Arnold Miller were able to show in 1981 that it is impossible to prove the statement add(𝒩) = add(ℳ) within ZFC. In other words, the numbers of null and meager sets that must be combined to produce a non-negligible set are not provably equal. Forcing is a method to construct mathematical universes. A mathematical universe is a model that satisfies the ZFC axioms. To show that a statement X is not refutable in ZFC, it is enough to find a universe in which both ZFC and X are valid.

Similarly, to show that X is not provable from ZFC, it is enough to find a universe where ZFC holds but X fails. Mathematical Universes with Surprising Properties Kunen and Miller used this method to construct a mathematical universe that satisfies add(𝒩) <. Add(ℳ). In this model, more meager than null sets are required to form a non-negligible set. Accordingly, it is impossible to prove add(𝒩) add(ℳ) from ZFC.In contrast, Tomek Bartoszyński discovered three years later that the converse inequality add(𝒩) ≤ add(ℳ) can be proved using ZFC.

This points to an asymmetry between the two notions of smallness. Let us note that this asymmetry is not visible if we assume CH because CH implies ℵ1 = add(𝒩) = add(ℳ). To summarize. Add(𝒩) ≤ add(ℳ) is provable, but neither add(𝒩) = add(ℳ) nor add(𝒩) <. Add(ℳ) is provable.

This is the same effect as with CH. It is trivial to prove that ℵ1 ≤ 2ℵ0, but neither ℵ1 <. 2ℵ0 nor ℵ1 = 2ℵ0 is provable. In addition to the cardinal numbers defined so far, there are two important cardinal characteristics—𝔟 and 𝔡—that refer to dominating functions of real numbers. For two continuous functions (of which there are 2ℵ0 many) f and g, f is said to be dominated by g if the inequality f(x) <.

G(x) holds for all sufficiently large x. For example, a quadratic function such as g(x) = x2 always dominates a linear function, say f(x) = 100x + 30.The cardinal number 𝔡 is defined as the smallest possible size of a set of continuous functions sufficient to dominate every possible continuous function.A variant of this definition gives the cardinal number 𝔟, namely the smallest size of a family B with the property that there is no continuous function that dominates all functions of B. It can be shown that ℵ1 ≤ 𝔟 ≤ 𝔡 ≤ 2ℵ0 holds.Several additional inequalities have been shown to hold between the 12 infinite cardinals we just defined. All these inequalities are summarized in Cichoń’s diagram, introduced by British mathematician David Fremlin in 1984 and named after his Polish colleague Jacek Cichoń. For typographical reasons, the less-or-equal signs are replaced by arrows.

Credit. Jakob Kellner There are two additional relations. Add(ℳ) is the smaller one of 𝔟 and cov(ℳ). Likewise, cof(ℳ) is the larger of 𝔡 and non(ℳ). These two “dependent” cardinals are marked with a frame in the Cichoń diagram.

The diagram thus comprises 12 uncountable cardinalities of which no more than 10 can be simultaneously different. How Different Can Infinities Be?. If CH holds, however, ℵ1 (the smallest number in the diagram) is equal to 2ℵ0 (the largest number in the diagram), and thus all entries are equal. If, on the other hand, we assume CH to be false, then they could be quite different.For several decades, mathematicians tried to show that none of the less-or-equal relations in Cichoń’s diagram can be strengthened to equalities. To do that, they constructed many different universes in which they assigned the two smallest uncountable cardinals, ℵ1 and ℵ2, to the entries of the diagram in various ways.

For example, they created a universe for which ℵ1 = add(𝒩) = cov(𝒩) and ℵ2 = non(ℳ) = cof(ℳ).This work enabled researchers in the 1980s to confirm that for all pairs of cardinals, only the relationships indicated in the diagram can be proved in ZFC. More precisely, for every labeling of the (independent) Cichoń diagram entries with the values ℵ1 and ℵ2 that honors the inequalities of the diagram, there is a universe that realizes the given labeling.So we have known for nearly four decades that all assignments of ℵ1 and ℵ2 to the diagram are possible. But what can we say for more than two values?. Could, for example, all the independent entries be simultaneously different?. Some cases with three characteristics have been known for 50 years, and in the 2010s, more universes were discovered (or constructed) in which up to seven different cardinals appeared in the Cichoń diagram.In a 2019 paper we constructed with Israeli mathematician Saharon Shelah of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a universe in which the maximum possible number of different infinite values—10, that is—appears in Cichoń’s diagram.

In doing so, however, we used a stronger system of axioms than ZFC, one that assumes the existence of “large cardinals,” infinities whose existence is not provable in ZFC alone.While we were very pleased with this result, we were not entirely satisfied. We worked for two more years to find a solution using only the ZFC axioms. Together with Shelah and Colombian mathematician Diego Mejía of Shizuoka University in Japan, we finally succeeded in proving the result without these additional assumptions.We have thus shown that the 10 characteristics of the real numbers can all be different. Let us note that we did not show that there can be at least, at most or precisely 10 infinite cardinals between ℵ1 and the continuum. This was already proved by Robert Solovay in 1963.

In fact, the size of the set of real numbers can vary greatly. There could be eight, 27 or infinitely many cardinal numbers between ℵ1 and 2ℵ0—even uncountably many. Rather our result proves that there are mathematical universes in which the 10 specific cardinal numbers between ℵ1 and 2ℵ0 turn out to be different. This is not the end of the story. As is usual for mathematics, many questions remain open, and new ones arise.

For example, in addition to the cardinal numbers described here, many other infinite cardinalities lying between ℵ1 and the continuum have been discovered since the 1940s. Their precise relationships to one another are unknown. To distinguish some of these characteristics in addition to those in Cichoń’s diagram is one of the upcoming challenges. Another one is to show that other orderings of 10 different values are possible. Unlike in the case for the two values ℵ1 and ℵ2, where we know that all possible orders are consistent, in the case of all 10 values, we could only show the consistency of two different orderings.

So, who knows, there may still be hitherto undiscovered equalities—involving more than two characteristics—hidden in the diagram.This article originally appeared in Spektrum der Wissenschaft and was reproduced with permission..

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