Category Archives: Science

Is our solar system the most unique in the universe?

Grappling with assumptions and knowledge bias

Say you are going to visit someone, but for thought-experiment reasons you know absolutely nothing about them, not even their name or gender or anything of the like. What can you confidently say about this person you don’t even know?

Well you can confidently say that they’re human, since I did specify that they were a “person,” and since there’s no evidence aliens exist on Earth. That means they eat food and breath air and all that other stuff. But besides the most vague generalities about human nature, you cannot confidently assert *anything* about them. If I forced you to guess about their qualities, you would only be able to guess the vaguest things that are almost universal among humans, like their physical traits (probably 2 arms and 2 legs) or human universalities (probably love their family, probably like food and traveling).

The only things you can confidently say about this person would be the *common and non-unique traits* that they probably share with all other humans. Because with so little to go on, it would be illogical to assume a set of very unique traits instead.

But then I tell you this person is an American. OK, you can now assume they almost certainly speak English (though it’s not totally certain, and they could always be a baby or a mute anyway). You can assume they know at least some of the cultural touchstones of Americanism (although again, they could be a baby), like they’ve heard the Star Spangled Banner, and they know what Star Wars and Marvel Movies are. They probably know that Hollywood is famous for movies, and that Texas is famous for oil.

But can you confidently say that they are a basketball player? Do you know if they enjoy Handel, Hershel, and Bach? Can you say anything about their politics wahtsoever?

If I then tell you they’re a climatologist, you get even more details. They’re likely on the left-side of the political spectrum. They’re almost certainly well-educated (a pre-requisite for climatology), and they’re far more likely to be an office worker than a manual laborer (although I guess *someone* has to install all those temperature stations).

Now let’s say that this person you’re going to meet is my friend Dave, who’s about 25 years old. Dave is a great basketball player, but he hates watching it because “the modern game is boring.” He likes jazz renditions of famous Baroque music. He plays Minecraft fanatically, although he’s never modded it. And he is a climatologist working at a local university, but he’s also deeply religious and prays before every meal.

The less you knew about Dave, the more generic he seemed. Just a person? There’s 8 billion of those. An American? They’re also common. Even a climatologist doesn’t seem unreasonably unique or special.

But when I gave you more details about his personality, he suddenly seemed fairly out of the ordinary: he’s both sporty and sciency, he’s young but also religious, he plays a popular game sure, but he also likes an incredibly eclectic style of music.

But is Dave *actually* unique? Or does his appearance of uniqueness come from *our knowledge* of him? I’d hazard than many of you can think of people in your lives with an even more unique set of traits, compared to the very few things I’ve told you about Dave. And when I was slowly describing Dave, before you knew how unique he was, you had to fill in the blanks with guesses based on common traits. This is true of anyone we don’t know well. People seem more common as we know less about them, more unique as we know more.

For every person we’ve ever met, we have a very limited set of knowledge about them, and we fill in whatever blanks exist with the “most likely” choices. That’s why even your parents or loved ones can still surprise you, as you may not have known that they did drugs in college, or ran a local newspaper, and you had just filled in those blanks with something else before they told you.

But that means that by definition, we default to assuming everyone around us has “common” and “ordinary” sets of traits. I’d hazard a guess that every person in the world has some set of traits that makes them extremely unique or out of the ordinary, even if these are things that you’d only know if you were close friends with them.

The office worker who reads about 2 books a week: that’s very out of the ordinary. The financial analyst who’s written a dozen murder mysteries: that’s very uncommon. The American who speaks fluent Korean: this is less common in America than having written a book. But if all you knew was “office worker,” “financial analyst,” or “American,” you’d think these people were more normal and less unique than my friend Dave up there, even if they end up being as or more unique than him when you know all their traits.

Extraordinary-ness is realized as we get more and more data about a person, as we find more and more things that are clearly *outliers* to the common trends. Because until we know those things, we naturally fill in the gaps in our knowledge with the “ordinary” placeholders, the “expected” values.

And the reason I’m talking about all that is that I’m almost certain this though process underlies claims about the uniqueness of our own sun and planet.

The Fermi Paradox and the Rare Earth Hypothesis

To shift gears slightly: many people have pondered about why Earth hasn’t been visited by aliens yet. If there are billions of stars in the Universe, and the Universe has existed for billions of years, then there should have been plenty of time for alien species to evolve, become technologically advanced, and start joyriding around the galaxy. As Enrico Fermi said: “where is everyone?”

A potential answer people have caught on is that intelligent life is unbelievably uncommon, and that Earth just happened to have a very very specific set of Astronomical circumstances that made life, and intelligent life, possible. Under this “Rare Earth Hypothesis,” life may evolve around only one in a quadrillion stars, there may only be a *single* life-bearing world in our galaxy: Earth.

Our planet and solar system do seem very rare. In the search for exoplanets, we rarely find ones with lots of gas giants so *far* away from their star, most gas giants appear way closer than ours do. Our sun also isn’t a binary star (like most sun-like stars are), and it has fewer flares and superflares.

But I would contend that, like my friend Dave above, we only notice our solar system’s “uniqueness” because we know so MUCH about our Sun and so LITTLE about exoplanets and their stars. We are *assuming regularity on all the variables we don’t have data for.*

Like, let’s take one of those stars that has a Jupiter-like gas giant orbiting close to the star. Maybe some of those Jupiters have large, rocky moons with complete atmospheres, and maybe these moons can support liquid water, which could support life. That’s probably uncommon, but is it more or less uncommon than our own system having its gas giants so far away?

Our planet has a very large moon, but are there exoplanets with rarer configurations, like an Earth sized planet with 4 or more smaller moons? Or an Earth sized planet with Saturn-like rings?

And our sun has unusually few flares, but is there a planet out there with an unusually strong magnetic field and an unusually thick water atmosphere, one that can easily protect its life-bearing planet from life-killing solar flares?

For this last example, let’s imagine that life has indeed evolved on such a world, intelligent life. They, like us, might think they’re the only life in the universe. They, like us, might think that their planet is unbelievably unique, and that their specific uniquenesses are what allowed their solar system to have life.

Maybe their solar system has a large gas giant orbitting close to the star, and the gas giant’s magnetic field, combine with their own planet’s uniqueness, serves to limit the damage of stellar flars coming to their planet. The gas giant could act like a kind of “shield,” sitting between their own planet and their star, too small to dim the star’s light, but with an incredibly strong magnetic field that blocks the force of any Coronal Mass Ejections (the technical name of large stellar flares).

These people might say “well of course life only evolved on *our* planet, how common is it to have a rocky terrestrial planet outside the orbit of a gas giant? We’ve never seen that in exoplanets. And our gas giant plus or magnetic field are unusually good at protecting us from solar flares. And since essentially all stars have large solar flares, then all planets but our own get blasted to death by Coronal Mass Ejections before intelligent life can evolve.”

But they wouldn’t be right, because we on Earth would still exist. And they’d be assuming every other star out there was “normal,” that there wasn’t a rocky planet *closer to its star* than a gas giant, orbiting an unusually quiet star. And since it would be so hard to get data on *our* star, they’d see our star and assume it was just another “ordinary” lifeless system (we’d have trouble knowing our own star had planets if we didn’t orbit it, it’s difficult to see by the most common measurement techniques)

See, I think Earth only seems *rare* because of how much we know about it. Just like Dave only seems *unique* because of how much I told you about him. If I’d just given you his more common traits (he’s 25, American, plays sports), he wouldn’t seem that unique or special at all.

The jar of marbles thought experiment

Imagine for instance that there’s a jar with 100 marbles in it, each numbered 1 to 100. You pull out number 8 and, aha! This is an exceptionally unique marble! No other marble has this specific number on it, and this marble is 1 in 100, isn’t that unique?

But in this jar, ALL the marbles are unique, they’re ALL 1 in 100. They’re just unique in different ways by having different numbers on them.

Or if you prefer, let’s say the jar of marbles has 999,900 marbles that are unlabeled, and 100 marbles numbered 1 to 100. Again you pull out marble number 8 and, aha, this time it’s even MORE unique! This time it’s a 1 in a MILLION marble! No other marble has this number!

But again, the numbered marbles are ALL 1 in a million, they have different numbers on them, different “things that make them unique,” but they are all still unique.

This marble thought experiment is how I think of the rare Earth hypothesis. Yes our Earth is rare, it’s got a number on it (life), and we think most other stars in the galaxy don’t have life, we assume most of them are unnumbered. But just because we’re 1 of a kind, with our own special number ENTIRELY DIFFERENT FROM ANYONE ELSE’S, doesn’t mean that another marble with another number doesn’t exist somewhere in the Galaxy, even somewhere close by.

We assume that life can only evolve if the marble has the number 8 on it, ie if a planet and solar system have our very unique set of traits (gas giant arrangement, large moon, quiet star, etc). But we don’t have telescopes powerful enough to *see the numbers* on any other marbles out in the galaxy, so we don’t know for sure if they have life or not. We assume that they are normal, that they have all the “common” traits stars have and that they don’t have anything special on them that would make them unique or life-bearing. But we don’t know.

There could be a number 9 marble right next door to us, a planet orbiting a star with its own collection of unique traits completely different from ours, but thinking just as we do that they are the only life-bearing system in the entire galaxy, because our star doesn’t have their star’s unique traits.

And they’d be wrong. And we’d be wrong too. Just something to think about: we should be more humble when trying to argue from “uniqueness.”

Anyway I still want to post part 2 of my fusion power post, so stay tuned for that very soon.

Fusion power: hype or hopeless?

I’m going to lay my cards on the table and say this: I think it’s extremely unlike that a nuclear fusion power plant will send any energy to civilian grids in my lifetime. Having said that:

The fusion hype cycle never ends, it hibernates. In 2006, the international community came together to plan a nuclear fusion test reactor in France, called ITER. 20 years later and it still hasn’t been built (it was supposed to be completed by 2016). But ITER isn’t an actual fusion power plant, it is merely a research testing station designed to help scientists plan what an *actual fusion power plant* might look like, and solve a few of the many unsolved problems that have plagued the industry.

But ITER isn’t the only game in town. In the easy money era of pre-2022, several start-up corporations came online, claiming that *they* would have a working fusion reactor before ITER even completed building. They’d be selling to the grid by 2025 (later 2030, then 2035). Helion, Commonwealth, there were some big names with big backers, claiming unequivocally that they would crack fusion power and start selling it to the grid.

With this, the hype for fusion has come in cycles, waxing and waning as old promises are broken and new promises are made. It’s a joke that gets some people very prickly to say that “fusion power is 20 years away, and has been for 75 years,” because fusion-backers are well aware of the industry’s many many failed promises but think that “this time, things will be different.” And maybe it will be! But I’m almost certain it won’t be.

Just so we’re all on the same page: what is fusion? If you smash two atoms together, you can produce more energy than you put in. Atoms don’t like smashing together though, they naturally repel each other very effectively. The only way to overcome this barrier is to crush the atoms under incredible pressure (in stars), or heat them up to millions or billions of degrees Kelvin (here on Earth). These super-heated atoms create a “plasma,” with electrons stripped from nuclei, and the theory is that the plasma can self-perpetuate: the fusion reactions produce enough heat to keep the plasma superheated, with excess heat being used to boil water and drive a steam turbine (generating electricity).

This post is probably too late in the hype cycle. I think 2022 was the sweet spot when I saw these startup discussed commonly on social media. But I want to make a post and here’s my thesis: none of the fusion startups, nor government projects have any hope of successfully making a fusion power plant that brings power to the grid.

That’s honestly a hard claim to defend because there are actually many different *types* of fusion, and even if you conclusively argue that the ITER-type fusion reactors are basically impossible in our lifetimes, the National Ignition Lab-type fusion supporters will come out of the woodwork to say that *their* ideas are actually better and more feasible, and then you have to start the argument all over. So I’m going to try to take this in stages.

First of all: there are several different atoms you can fuse nuclei together to make energy. You can fuse any atoms lighter than Iron together and get more energy than you put in (supermassive stars do this in their cores). But the realistic scenarios of fusion here on earth focus on a few select atoms. To get the nomenclature down, Hydrogen comes in 3 isotopes: a single proton with no neutrons (normal boring hydrogen), a single proton with a single neutron (deterium aka “heavy hydrogen,” which also makes up “heavy water”), and a single proton with 2 neutrons (aka tritium). So anyway here’s how you’d do fusion here on Earth

  • Tritium-Deuterium fusion – nearly every serious fusion proposal wants to do this
  • Deuterium-Deuterium fusion – harder to do, but deuterium is extremely abundant compared to tritium
  • Something else (Deuterium-Helium3, Hyrogen-Boron, etc) – occasionally proposed when people are tired of naysayers like me pointing out how the previous two are infeasible

I’ll take these in reverse order:

Something Else (Deuterium-Helium3, Hyrogen-Boron, etc)

Using “something else” besides Tritium or Deterium for fusion is a pretty dead-on-arrival proposal in my opinion, mostly due to “Bremsstrahlung radiation” which I will directly translate to “braking radiation” because I’m not good at German.

When atoms are superheated (which is necessary if you want to get them to fuse), their nucleus and electrons separate. The negatively charged electrons whip around freely, wholly unchained to the positively charged nucleus.

But what happens when an electron and a nucleus fly past each other? Their opposite charges will interact and pull towards each other. The electron (which is WAY lighter than the nucleus) will slow down immensely, “braking” as it is pulled by the charge of the nucleus. When a charged particle slows down, it must emit energy, and so the electron emits X-ray radiation as it breaks to a near screeching halt compared to its previously unimaginable speeds.

That’s why it’s called “braking radiation.”

The thing about braking radiation is that it becomes more powerful as the atoms involved get bigger. That’s because bigger atoms have a bigger nucleus which carry a bigger charge. The Hydrogen nucleus has a measly +1 charge, it causes a tiny braking radiation on the zipping electrons. Boron nuclei have a +5 charge. They don’t cause 5 times as much braking radiation, they actually cause 25 times as much because the radiation goes up with the square of the charge.

This braking radiation produces massive amounts of X-rays, but it’s not the danger of the X-rays that is the problem, it’s the fact that they take with them all the heat of the plasma. Remember that this is happening in a fusion reactor, the reactor *must* be superheated to hundreds of millions degrees Kelvin (or Billions in the case of Boron and Helium based fusion). But the braking radiation produces so many X-rays, that they all radiate away and steal the heat from the plasma.

So if you try to do fusion with a Boron or Helium-based plasma, you need the heat from the fusion to keep the plasma hot enough to *continue fusing*. However the braking radiation will unavoidably be *cooling the plasma down faster than the fusion heats it up*. You’ll start up your fusion reactor at several billions of degrees Kelvin, only to see it rapidly cool to below-fusion temperatures, as fusion cannot keep it hot faster than braking radiation cools it down.

Fundamentally, it’s not possible on earth to do this kind of plasma fusion with Boron and Helium. The startups try to handwave this away, proposing for instance that they can heat the nuclei (so they’ll fuse) without heating the electrons (so they won’t produce braking radiation), but that’s pretty much nonsense (the two trade heat back and forth almost instantly).

Anyway that’s my two cents. Fusion that relies on elements heavy than hydrogen is impossible in the mid to near future, as there’s no reasonable way to keep the plasma hot while the braking radiation cools it down.

Deuterium-Deuterium fusion

D-D (D alone usually means “Deuterium” when talking fusion) is sometimes presented as an alternative to Tritium. But it isn’t. D-D fuses nearly 300 times more slowly than T-D (Tritium-Deterium) at the temperatures ITER and other startups are capable of reaching (a few million degrees Kelviun). That doesn’t just mean you need a power plant 300 times bigger, it realistically means D-D fusion *cannot heat the plasma faster than it cools*, meaning just like above you’d turn on your fusion reactor only to see it quickly cool as the fusion can’t sustain the temperature.

To make D-D fusion self-sustaining, you’d need temperatures of a few billion degrees Kelvin, not just a few hundred million. An order of magnitude bigger with an order of magnitude more problems keeping that plasma confined (ie not destroying the power plant) while fusion is kicking off.

No one has realistically proposed confinement methods that use known materials and keep the plasma from escaping or cooling down. There’s usually talk at this point of proposed or speculative materials, things that *might* work, but either haven’t been tested yet, haven’t been made in more than microgram quantities, or just haven’t been invented yet.

Tritium-Deuterium fusion (there’s a lot to cover)

Why then does everyone come back to T-D fusion? Why does every serious proposal use this and only this? Why is the international collaboration ITER, a collaboration between most of the world’s advanced economies, still only have plans to fuse Tritium to Deuterium? Basically it’s process of elimination. I don’t want to explain resonance states and Helium-5, but T-D fusion is the only atomic fusion that is reachable with materials that are currently under study, needing a mere 150 million degrees Kelvin to get going, unlike D-D fusion. And because both T and D have a charge of just +1, the braking radiation is marginal.

So of ALL the elements on the periodic table, and ALL the isotopes of those elements, Tritium-Deuterium is the only pair we can reasonably fuse in a controlled manner with the technology available today and for the next 100 years.

But just because it’s possible to fuse these atoms, doesn’t mean it’s possible to power the world with them.

See, fusing Tritium isn’t like putting gas in your car, Tritium is rarer than Diamonds, rarer than Gold, rarer than Platinum and Palladium and Plutonium. If Tritium is considered separately from Hydrogen, it would be one of the rarest element on Earth. There are about 25 kilograms of Tritium in the entire world. There are over 200,000,000 kg of Gold currently in human hands, and there are billions to trillions more deep within the Earth’s crust and oceans.

But to power a city like Chicago for a year would need about 275 kg of Tritium. The entire world’s supply of Tritium would power America’s 4th largest city for less than 2 months.

How are fusion advocates claiming they’ll power our cities, if the resources necessary to do so are so incredibly rare?

Well it helps to know where Tritium comes from. None of the Tritium on Earth was formed naturally. Tritium has a half-life of about 12 years, so if any of it WAS here when our planet formed 4ish billion years ago, it has long since decayed away. Instead, Earth’s Tritium was formed when Deuterium is hit with high energy radiation. Deuterium is a rare isotope of Hydrogen, so this doesn’t happen much in nature. But it DOES happen a lot in Canada, because of the CANDU fission reactors.

CANDU reactors use uranium to create power, and they moderate their energy production with Deuterated water, aka heavy water, aka water where the normal Hydrogen has been replaced by Deuterium. A CANDU reactor creates the perfect conditions for the creation of Tritium, although they consider this a biproduct that needs to be removed, not a desired effect. But again, because of the 12 year half-life, the Tritium that Canada produces quickly decays away to nothing while in storage, so there’s never been a chance to create a whole lot of it for fusion power.

So back to the question: if there isn’t enough Tritium to run a fusion reactor, how can fusion power our cities? Fusion advocates want to CREATE new Tritium, using their fusion reactors, and feed the created fusion back in to continue the process. Canada’s 25 kg of Tritium would be like a “pilot light” for a fusion reactor. Once the reactor has been turned on with a little Tritium, it can keep producing more and more Tritium as it needs, continuing the fusion process indefinitely. Deuterium by the way is relatively rare, but Earth has SO MUCH WATER that it won’t be *that* hard to get the Deuterium needed from that.

But here’s the thing: I believe it will be IMPOSSIBLE for fusion reactors to create the Tritium they need with the technology available to use within the next 100 years. I will continue this thought in my next post, because this one is getting long, but to summarize my thesis:

  • Fusing anything except Tritium and Deuterium for power will be impossible for the foreseeable future.
    • The temperatures needed are too high
    • The braking radiation will steal power from the reactor faster than power is created
  • Tritium-Deuterium fusion is the only possibility for fusion power for the foreseeable future
    • But it will be impossible to produce enough Tritium to do this for the foreseeable future

I haven’t proven that last point, but I will devote an entire post to it soon. I want to get this posted because I’ve been writing of it for a week, and it’s already very long. But stay tuned for the next post, because if I can prove that point then it will support the final bullet point of my thesis:

  • It will not be possible to power humanity with fusion for the foreseeable future.

College Students and Desire Paths

I blogged before about video games and desire paths, but I wanted to add something from my own work experience as well.

To reiterate, a desire path is a dirt path worn down by people trying to get from A to B in the quickest way possible. There may be a concrete path that gets from A to B, but if it winds around and is inefficient, people will make their own path instead.

I teach science, and I like to say that “students, like molecules, seek the lowest energy state.” A good teacher of wants to set up their class so that the students learn something, and then are asked to demonstrate their knowledge, with the grade being given for how well they do at demonstrating. Students aren’t necessarily there to learn however, they are often grade-focused. So they seek any way to improve their grade at no cost in energy.

When a student writes a lab report, it takes them time and effort to actually study the material, learn the chemistry behind their experiment, and explain what they did and what their results entail. It takes a lot less energy to instead laser-focus on the rubric and attempt to game the system by answering only the questions presented in the rubric without ever understanding the actual experiment.

Here’s an example: the rubric asks the students to “explain the 2-stage design of the experiment, and doing the first stage was necessary to complete the second stage.” A student may try to answer: “the experiment had a two-stage design, and doing the first stage was necessary to complete the second stage.” But they aren’t actually explaining anything, they’re just repeating the question as a statement and hoping a bored grader will let them slide on through.

This is actually made worse by the grading system my department has implemented for labs. In a classical class, lab reports are graded for accuracy and the average of all lab report grades is the grade you get for the lab class. In this new system however, labs are graded on a pass/fail system, with a 70% being all that’s necessary for a “pass.” Then the student’s grade at the end of the semester is based on how many labs they passed, and any labs they don’t pass can be resubmitted at a later date.

This 70% + pass/fail system incentivized many students to try to game the system and answer just enough so they can get a “pass,” without actually trying to do well on the entire lab report. Because what’s the incentive to put effort in when a 70% and a 100% get you the same result? Students will very clearly just give up on doing one of the 5 rubric items, because they know doing the other 4 items well gets them a pass. This often leads to students completely the class with high grades but with gaping holes in their knowledge, as they just ignored parts of the material because it was too hard and focused on acing the easier parts instead.

I’ve spoken to the department that this is a bad incentive system if we want students to learn. Student’s won’t really try to learn all the material if learning just 70% gives them the same grade as learning 100%. The department is right now *only* focused on how many students pass, and this easier system is indeed increasing student scores.

I said before that a desire path should make you rethink how your system is set up, and try to incentivize people to go in the directions they should be going, without just putting road blocks on the desire path. You can pave a newer, quicker path, or you can change where things are located so people are incentivized to walk the paved path.

The same is true for student learning, if your system incentives students to half-ass it, change the incentives. Don’t just clap that more are passing and then wonder why people are having a harder time with upper level courses later.

Stars with a Story

I wanted to tell a short story about a star I found interesting. It’s nothing like I’ve blogged about before, but I haven’t blogged in a long time and I need to write SOMETHING.

At the heart of the Crab Nebula is a little star that I will call Crabby. Its real name is PSR B0531+21, but no one’s going to remember that name so Crabby it is. Crabby is a star that exploded in 1054 AD, and the Crab Nebula is the remnants of that explosion.

What’s so special about Crabby is that we know *exactly* when it exploded, because Chinese astronomers recorded it. For almost every other supernova remnant in the galaxy we don’t have that kind of information, it’s hard to tell whether something exploded a million years ago or a *billion* years ago because we’re viewing it from so far away. So knowing the exact *year* that Crabby exploded is like knowing someone’s time of birth down to the millisecond. It gives us incredible precision that we normally don’t get in astronomy.

And that precision has let scientists come up with some wacky theories, such as the theory that Crabby is a “strange star.”

Now what’s a strange star exactly? Isn’t it a little rude to call a star “strange” in the first place? Well it requires a little bit of quantum mechanics to explain this, but read on because I promise it’s worth the read.

See, when a star normally collapses, the force of gravity becomes so great that it compactifies the matter within to a ridiculous extent. The core of a collapsing star is usually made of heavy elements like iron, and the collapse forces those atoms as close together as physically possible. There’s a simple rule in quantum mechanics: two things can’t occupy the same exact space, and this rule leads to an absolute limit of density: the density where atoms can’t get any closer together or they’d literally overlap.

Here on earth atoms aren’t usually that close together. Liquids and gases of course let atoms slosh about, but even solids on earth usually have their atoms arranged in intricate patterns with a little bit of space in between each atom. White dwarfs crush this down into the absolute limit of density, around a ton or more per cubit centimeter.

So white dwarfs like this are ultra compact objects with ultra compact structures. But gravity can do even better than a white dwarf.

See the strength of gravity depends on mass: more mass, more gravity. So what happens in the cases of a VERY massive white dwarf? Their high mass means they want to crush things down even denser, but we’ve already reached the limits of atomic density, so where else can we go?

Well remember that atoms themselves are mostly made up of empty space, there’s a lot of emptiness between the nucleus and the electrons, for example. Atoms themselves can be crushed down into just their neutrons, with each proton absorbing an electron to become a neutron. When we crush down atoms in this way, we remove all that empty space they contain, and that lets us crush the whole star down to *even greater levels of density*.

At this level we have a “neutron star,” a star so crushingly dense that it’s the size of a city with the mass of the sun. Our friend Crabby is theorized to be a neutron star. But it might possibly be even more special.

Some have theorized that Crabby is a bit too cold for its age, and how could it have lost all that heat? The answer may bring us to the fringes of theoretical physics.

See just like atoms can be crushed down into neutrons, neutrons can be crushed down further. Neutrons are made up of 3 quarks: 2 down quarks and 1 up quark. But those quarks are much smaller than the neutron itself, and between them is mostly empty space. So once again, if the gravity of the star is strong enough, a neutron star can be “crushed down,” until its neutrons are crushed into quarks.

The whole star itself can’t be crushed like this, or else it would get so small that it would become a black hole. But the core of a massive neutron star may be so dense that its neutrons are indeed crushed into quarks, releasing all that empty space within the neutrons, and leaving a quark-rich soup that resembles the instant after the big bang. We have no firm evidence of this happening, but if it happens, then such a star would be called a quark star.

And then some massive quark stars might have a final trick up their sleeves. Remember that rule from earlier, about how 2 things can’t occupy the same space? That rule is what holds each of these type of stars from crushing down too far. White dwarfs can’t let their atoms occupy the same space, it’s only when the force of gravity is *large enough to crush atoms* that a white dwarf gets crushed down into a neutron star.

Similarly, neutron stars can’t let their neutrons occupy the same space, and that’s what keeps them from crushing down further. But when gravity is strong enough to *crush neutrons*, then parts of the neutron star might devolve into a quark star.

But in a quark star, the neutrons are crushed into 2 down quarks and 1 up quark each. Now here’s the funny thing about that quantum rule I told you about: two things can’t occupy the same space right? Well that’s only true *if they’re the same type of thing*. Two neutrons can’t occupy the same space because they’re both neutrons. Same with 2 down quarks, they can’t occupy the same space either. But a down quark and an up quark? They can occupy the same space no problem.

So the neutrons are crushed into 2 down quarks and 1 up quark right? 1 down and 1 up quark can occupy roughly the same space, they can take up 1 “unit” of space together. But that second down quark? It needs to find a *different* space for itself to occupy.

But let’s bring gravity back into the picture: we’ve already seen how it can crush atoms down to neutrons, and neutrons down to quarks, can it crush these quarks even further? Well not directly, quarks are “fundamental particles,” there’s nothing they could crush down into. But there is an *indirect* form of crushing that could happen…

Remember that 1 down and 1 up quark can share the same space but that second down quark has to find a new space. If we could change that second down quark into something else, we could free up that space so gravity could crush further, but how?

Well while all the “regular” matter of our universe, stars, planets, bloggers, is all made of just up and down quarks, there’s more quarks then just them hiding in the fringes of particle physics.

The strange quark is another type of quark, different from up and down. It’s decidedly strange indeed, since it doesn’t exist anywhere in the universe except for fractions of a second at very high energies. But that’s not important, what *is* important is that *it’s another type of quark,” and just like how up and down quarks can share the same space because they’re different from each other, a strange quark *can also share that space* because it’s different from both up and down quarks.

So at the very highest limits of density, when neutrons themselves are crushed and when their quarks are crushed further, the sheer force of gravity might force those quarks to take drastic action. Half of the down quarks from the neutrons might convert into strange quarks, so that they can take up less space with the other quarks and crush the star yet further.

If this is the case, and these strange quarks do exist at the hearts of massive neutron stars, then this may the *only* place they exist for any significant length of time. Usually strange quarks decay because they’re so unstable, but at the crushing densities here, strange quarks are forced to *exist* because it’s the only way to crush down far enough under gravity. Despite being unstable, strange quarks here *can’t* decay, because gravity is forcing them to stay strange.

Now this is all very theoretical, but it begs the question: do strange stars even exist?

Maybe

And it begs another question: is Crabby a strange star?

Maybe maybe

Like I said if the neutrons are crushed into quarks and eventually strange quarks, it will only happen at the very center of the neutron star, a place we can’t observe and can only speculate about. But there is tantalizing evidence: we know exactly how old Crabby is thanks to those Chinese astronomers who recorded its explosion, and our evidence shows it to be a fair bit colder than we’d expect for a neutron star of its age, why could that be?

It’s been suggested that when neutrons are crushed into quarks and then strange quarks, that bursts of neutrinos are created which carry away much of the star’s heat into the cosmos. It *may be* that such a thing happened to Crabby, which is why it’s so cold.

This theory wouldn’t even be possible if we didn’t know how old Crabby is, if it were just another neutron star we would always have questions about if it’s actually just an older star that has had time to cool down, rather than being a young star that is unusually cold. And we owe it all to the astronomers from the past who first saw Crabby in their night sky, nearly one thousand years ago.

“Why don’t they only film the hits?”

There’s a joke from “That Mitchel and Webb Look” that I want to dissect like a frog for a moment. The video is just one minute long, but if you don’t want to watch it I can summarize it here:

  • “So for the sketches we’re filming, I’m thinking we’ll make them “hit, hit, miss, hit, miss, miss”
  • “Do we have to film all the misses as well as the hits? Why not only film the hits and use those for the show?”
  • “Well it’s a sketch comedy show, it has to be hit and miss.”

The joke doesn’t need to be explained, but I will anyway: why does a sketch comedy show have a lot of sketches that miss the mark, as well as ones that are laugh out loud funny? Isn’t it easier to just film the hits? Well obviously the writers didn’t think those misses would miss the mark, they thought those misses might be hits as well, that’s why they wrote them and filmed them. You don’t know for sure what will be a hit and what will be a miss before you release the show.

A similar pattern is discussed with venture capital investing. Venture capitalists invest in hundreds of startups on the assumption that around 90% of them will fail and make no money at all. The 10% that succeed are expected to pay for all the failures. Well then why don’t venture capitalists *only* invest in the successes and not waste money investing in the failures? Again: they don’t know for sure what will succeed or fail before investing. A huge amount of time and money goes into predicting the success or failure of startups so these VCs can try to invest wisely, but it isn’t a solved problem by any means.

And if you think this investing problem has an obvious solution, take out a personal loan and invest 50,000$ in a single startup that *you know for sure* is guaranteed to be successful. You’ll 1000x your money and be able to pay off the loan and interest easily.

But this pattern of “why not only go for the hits?” holds true in science as well. But here many people don’t seem to understand or believe it.

Governments, corporations, and charities invest billions into potentially lifesaving treatments every year. 90% of those scientific ventures will come to nothing, only a few will be successful. But you don’t know for sure which will succeed and which won’t before you try.

I think of this because I all too often see people complain about “why did we invest X number of dollars into researching such and such, when Y was invented with so much less?” A World War 2 version of this is the infamous refrain about how the project to develop a better bomb-sight for American planes costed more than the Manhattan Project which made nuclear bombs. A modern version of this complaint might be complaining that the Amyloid hypothesis in Alzheimer’s disease has received so much funding despite never curing Alzheimer’s.

In both cases though, our best foreknowledge seemed to indicate that this was the right path. Nuclear fission was completely unproven tech, the scientists themselves were pessimistic about their abilities to make a bomb out of it. When the first test of a real nuclear bomb took place, the scientists involved had a bet going for how much power the bomb would produce (with some predicting it would be a dud). *EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM* drastically underestimated the power of the bomb they had created, the most wildly optimistic predictions underestimated the bomb’s power by half.

By contrast air-power was a proven war winner when the USA started spending billions on bomb-sights. Germany’s blitzkrieg had used massive air power to help them overwhelm, surround, and destroy, other nations all across Europe. Air power could destroy the railroads and bridges that let troops move across modern battlefields, it could destroy the factories where the troop’s guns and tanks were made, and domination of the air allowed an army a far better picture of the battlefield then their enemies had. In this scenario, the allies looked at the success of German air power and believed that upping their own air power might similarly prove dividends. They never got the total success of the German blitzkrieg, but overwhelming air power was at least part of how the USA held on in the Korean war, so it wasn’t a complete waste.

Similarly, the evidence for Alzheimer’s disease has always seemed to point toward Amyloid Beta playing a key role. The evident failure of drugs targeting Amyloid Beta means there’s a lot more we have to learn, but just because the Amyloid Hypothesis is flawed doesn’t mean a competing hypothesis is automatically right. Putting billions towards the Tau or neurotransmitter hypotheses is not guaranteed to have brought success, in fact these hypotheses were studied even during the dominance of the Amyloid Hypothesis, and neither of them produced working drugs either.

People have a video-game understanding of research, as I’ve complained about before. They think that if we just put enough money towards the correct hypothesis, we’ll find what we’re looking for. But we don’t know what’s correct before we commit our money, and if our hypothesis fails, we don’t even know if we just haven’t thrown *enough* money at the problem, or if we’re chucking good money after bad. Which answer you lean to likely says more about your politics than about the quality of the research itself. Should we throw more and more money towards commercial nuclear fusion, even though that industry has never once succeed in even the most modest goals set for itself? Should we cut off the Amyloid Hypothesis, even though a century of research shows that Amyloid Beta does play a key role in Alzheimer’s disease? Everyone seems to think they already know the answer, but few are willing to prove it with evidence.

So whatever happened with Aduhelm?

Aduhelm and Leqimbi were hot news a few years ago. They are both antibodies that work as anti-Alzheimer’s disease drugs by binding to and hopefully destroying amyloid beta. The hypothesis that amyloid beta is the causative agent of Alzheimer’s, and that reducing amyloid beta will lessen the disease, is known as the Amyloid Hypothesis. And while the Amyloid Hypothesis is still the most widely supported, I wonder if the failures of Aduhelm and Leqimbi to make much of a dent to Alzheimer’s disease has damaged the hypothesis somewhat.

Because think about it, the whole job of an antibody is to help your body clear a foreign object. When antibodies bind to something, they trigger your immune system to destroy it. And this is why you get inflammation whenever you get a cut or scrape, antibodies will bind to whatever microscopic dirt and bacteria that enter your body, and your immune system flooding that area to destroy them is felt by you as inflammation.

And we know that Aduhelm and Leqimbi are working as antibodies against amyloid beta. They bind strongly to amyloid beta, they induce inflammation when given to Alzheimer’s patients (although inflammation in the brain can cause multiple side effects), and tests show that they seem to be reducing the amount of amyloid beta in the patients who take them.

Yet the prognosis for Alzheimer’s is not much better with these drugs than without them. Maybe they just aren’t destroying *enough* amyloid beta, but they are barely reducing the rate at which Alzheimer’s patients decline in mental faculty, and are not at all causing patients to improve and regain their mental state. Maybe the brain just *can’t* be fixed once it’s been damaged by amyloid beta, but you’d hope that there would at least be some improvement for patients if the Amyloid hypothesis is correct.

This has caused the field to seemingly split, with many still supporting the Amyloid hypothesis but saying these drugs don’t target amyloid beta correctly, with others now fractured in trying to study the many, many other possible causes of Alzheimer’s diesease. Tau, ApoE, neurotransmitters, there’s lots of other stuff that might cause this disease, but I want to focus on the final hail mary of the Amyloid hypothesis: that the drugs aren’t targeting amyloid beta correctly.

Because it’s honestly not the stupidest idea. One thing I learned when I researched this topic was the variety of forms and flavors that *any* protein can come in, and amyloid beta is no different.

When it’s normally synthesized, amyloid beta is an unfolded protein, called “intrinsically disordered” because it doesn’t take a defined shape. Through some unknown mechanism, multiple proteins can then cluster together to form aggregates, again of no defined shape. But these aggregates can fold into a very stable structure called a protofilament, and protofilaments can further stabilize into large, long filaments.

Each of these different structures of amyloid beta, from the monomers to the aggregates to the filaments, will have a slightly different overall shape and will bind slightly differently to antibodies. One reason given for why Aduheim causes more brain bleeds than Leqimbi is because Aduheim binds to the large filaments of amyloid beta, which are often found in the blood vessels of the brain. By siccing the body’s immune system on these large filaments, the blood vessels get caught in the crossfire, and bleeding often results.

Meanwhile other antibodies are more prone to target other forms of amyloid beta, such as the protofilaments or the amorphous aggregates.

But what amyloid beta does or what it looks like in its intrinsically disordered state is still unknown, and still very hard to study. All our techniques for studying small proteins like this require them to have a defined shape. Our instruments are like a camera, and amyloid beta is like a hummingbird flapping its wings too fast. We can’t see what those wings look like because they just look like a blur to our cameras.

So maybe we’ve been looking at the wrong forms of amyloid beta, rather than the filaments and protofilaments which are easy to extract, see, and study, maybe we should have been looking at the intrinsically disordered monomers all along, and we only studied the filaments and protofilaments because we were *able* to study them, not because they were actually important.

There’s a parable I heard in philosophy class about a drunk man looking for his keys. He keeps searching under the bright streetlight but can never seem to find them. But he’s only searching under the streetlight because *that’s where he can see*, he isn’t searching because *that’s where his keys are*.

Endlessly searching the only places you *can* search won’t necessarily bring results, you may instead need to alter your methods to search where you currently can’t. And if the Amyloid hypothesis is to be proven true, that will probably be necessary. Because right now I’ve heard nothing to write home about Aduheim and Leqimbi, many doctors won’t even proscribe them because the risk of brain bleeds is greater than the reward of very marginally slowing a patient’s mental decline, not even reversing the decline.

I no longer directly research Alzheimer’s disease, but the field is in a sad place when just 4 years ago it seemed like it was on the cusp of a breakthrough.

Research labs are literally sucking the blood from their graduate students

I’m going for a “clickbait” vibe with this one, is it working?

When I was getting my degree, I heard a story that seemed too creepy to be real. There was a research lab studying the physiology of white blood cells, and as such they always needed new white blood cells to do experiments on. For most lab supplies, you buy from a company. But when you’re doing this many experiments, using this many white blood cells, that kind of purchasing will quickly break the bank. This lab didn’t buy blood, it took it.

The blood drives were done willingly, of course. Each grad student was studying white blood cells in their own way, and each one needed a plethora of cells to do their experiment. Each student was very willing to donate for the cause, if only because their own research would be impossible otherwise.

And it wasn’t even like this was dangerous. The lab was connected to a hospital, the blood draws were done by trained nurses, and charts were maintained so no one gave more blood than they should. Everything was supposedly safe, sound, by the book.

But still it never seemed enough. The story I got told was that *everyone* was being asked to give blood to the lab, pretty much nonstop. Spouses/SOs of the grad students, friends from other labs, undergrads interning over the summer, visiting professors who wanted to collaborate. The first thing this lab would ask when you stepped inside was “would you like to donate some blood?”

This kind of thing quickly can become coercive even if it’s theoretically all voluntary. Are you not a “team player” if you don’t donate as much as everyone else? Are interns warned about this part of the lab “culture” when interviewing? Does the professor donate just like the students?

Still, when this was told to me it seemed too strange to be true. I was certain the storyteller was making it up, or at the very least exaggerating heavily. The feeling was exacerbated since this was told to me at a bar, and it was a “friend of a friend” story, the teller didn’t see it for themself.

But I recently heard of this same kind of thing, in a different context. My co-worker studied convalescent plasma treatments during the COVID pandemic. For those who don’t know, people who recover from a viral infection have lots of antibodies in their blood that fight off the virus. You can take samples of their blood and give those antibodies to other patients, and the antibodies will help fight the infection. Early in the pandemic, this kind of treatment was all we had. But it wasn’t very effective and my co-worker was trying to study why.

When the vaccine came out, all the lab members got the vaccine and then immediately started donating blood. After vaccination, they had plenty of anti-COVID antibodies in their blood, and they could extract all those antibodies to study them. My co-worker said that his name and a few others were attached to a published paper, in part because of their work but also in part as thanks for their generous donations of blood. He pointed to a figure in the paper and named the exact person whose antibodies were used to make it.

I was kind of shocked.

Now, this all seems like it could be a breach of ethics, but I do know that there are some surprisingly lax restrictions on doing research so long as you’re doing research on yourself. There’s a famous story of two scientists drinking water infected with a specific bacteria in order to prove that it was that bacteria which caused ulcers. This would have been illegal had they wanted to infect *other people* for science, but it was legal to infect themselves.

There’s another story of someone who tried to give themselves bone cancer for science. This person also believed that a certain bone cancer was caused by infectious organisms, and he willingly injected himself with a potentially fatal disease to prove it. Fortunately he lived (bone cancer is NOT infectious), but this is again something that was only legal because he experimented on himself.

But still, those studies were all done half a century ago. In the 21st century, experimenting with your own body seems… unusual at the very least. I know blood can be safely extracted without issue, but like I said above I worry about the incentive structure of a lab where taking students’ blood for science is “normal.” You can quickly create a toxic culture of “give us your blood,” pressuring people to do things that they may not want to do, and perhaps making them give more than they really should.

So I’m quite of two minds about the idea of “research scientists giving blood for the lab’s research projects.” All for the cause of science, yes, but is this really ethical? And how much more work would it really have been to get other people’s blood instead? I just don’t think I could work in a lab like that, I’m not good with giving blood, I get terrible headaches after most blood draws, and I wouldn’t enjoy feeling pressured to give even more.

Is there any industry besides science where near-mandatory blood donations would even happen? MAYBE healthcare? But blood draws can cause lethargy, and we don’t want the EMTs or nurses to be tired on the job. Either way, it’s all a bit creepy, innit?

The need for data, the need for good data

Another stream of consciousness, this one will be a story that will make some people go “no shit sherlock,” but it’s a lesson I had to learn on my own, so here goes:

My work wants me to make plans for “professional development,” every year I should be gaining skills or insights that I didn’t have the year before.  Professional development is a whole topic on its own, but for now let’s just know that I pledged to try to integrate machine learning into some of my workflows for reasons.

Machine learning is what we used to call AI.  It’s not necessarily *generative* AI (like ChatGPT), I mean it can be, but it’s not necessarily so.

So for me, integrating machine learning wasn’t about asking ChatGPT to do all my work, rather it was about trying to write some code to take in Big Data and give me a testable hypothesis.  My data was the genetic sequences of many different viruses, and the hypotheses were: “can we predict which animal viruses might spill over and become human viruses?” and “can we predict traits of understudied viruses using the traits of their more well-studied cousins?”.

My problem was data.  

There is actually a LOT of genetic data out there in the internet.  You can search a number of repositories, NCBI is my favorite, and find a seemingly infinite number of genomes for different viruses.  Then you can download them, play around with them, and make machine learning algorithms with them.

But lots of data isn’t useful by itself.  Sure I know the sequences of a billion viruses, what does that get me?  It gets me the sequences of a billion viruses, nothing more nothing less.

What I really need is real-world data *about* those sequences.  For instance: which of these viruses are purely human viruses, purely animal viruses, or infect both humans AND animals?  What cell types does this virus infect?  How high is the untreated mortality rate if you catch it?  How does it enter the cell?

The real world data is “labels” in the language of machine learning, and while I had a ton of data I didn’t have much *labelled* data.  I can’t predict whether an animal virus might become a human virus if I don’t even know which viruses are human-only or animal-only.  I can’t predict traits about viruses if I don’t have any information about those traits.  I can do a lot of fancy math to categorize viruses based on their sequences, but without good labels for those viruses, my categories are meaningless.  I might as well be categorizing the viruses by their taste, for all the good it does me.

Data labels tell you everything that the data can’t, and without them the data can seem useless.  I can say 2 viruses are 99% identical, but what does that even mean?  Is it just two viruses that give you the sniffles and not much else?  Or does one cause hemorrhagic fever and the other causes encephalitis?  

I don’t know if that 1% difference is even important, if these viruses infect 2 different species of animals it’s probably very important.  But if these viruses infect the same animals using identical pathways and are totally identical in every way except for a tiny stretch of DNA, then that 1% is probably unimportant.

Your model is only as good as your data and your data is only as good as your labels.  The real work of machine learning isn’t finding data, it’s finding labelled data.  A lot of machine learning can be about finding tricks to get the data labelled, for instance ChatGPT was trained on things like Wikipedia and Reddit posts because we can be mostly sure those are written by humans.  Similarly if you find some database of viral genomes, and a *different* database of other viral traits (what they infect, their pathway, their mortality rate), then you can get good data and maybe an entire publication just by matching the genomes to their labels.

But the low-hanging fruit was picked a long time ago.  I’m trying to use public repositories, and if there was anything new to mine there then other data miners would have gotten to it first. I still want to somehow integrate machine learning just because I find coding so enjoyable, and it gives me something to do when I don’t want to put on gloves.  But clearly if I want to find anything useful, I have to either learn how to write code that will scrape other databases for their labels, create *my own data*, or maybe get interns to label the data for me as a summer project.  

Stay tuned to find out if I get any interns.

If the government doesn’t do this, no one will

I’m not exactly happy about the recent NIH news. For reference the NIH has decided to change how it pays for the indirect costs of research. When the NIH gives a 1 million dollar grant, the University which receives the grant is allowed to demand a number of “indirect costs” to support the research.

These add up to a certain percentage tacked onto the price of the grant. For a Harvard grant, this was about 65%, for a smaller college it could be 40%. What it meant was that a 1 million grant to Harvard was actually 1.65 million, while a smaller college got 1.4 million, 1 million was always for the research, but 0.65 or 0.4 was for the “indirect costs” that made the research possible.

The NIH has just slashed those costs to the bone, saying it will pay no more than 15% in indirect costs. A 1 million dollar grant will now give no more than 1.15 million.

There’s a lot going on here so let me try to take it step by step. First, some indirect costs are absolutely necessary. The “direct costs” of a grant *may not* pay for certain things like building maintenance, legal aid (to comply with research regulations), and certain research services. Those services are still needed to run the research though, and have to be paid for somehow, thus indirect costs were the way to pay them.

Also some research costs are hard to itemize. Exactly how much should each lab pay for the HVAC that heats and cools their building? Hard to calculate, but the building must be at a livable temperature or no researcher will ever work in it, and any biological experiment will fail as well. Indirect costs were a way to pay for all the building expenses that researchers didn’t want to itemize.

So indirect costs were necessary, but were also abused.

See, unlike what I wrote above, a *university* almost never receives a government grant, a *primary investigator* (called a PI) does instead. The PI gets the direct grant money (the 1 million dollars), but the University gets the indirect costs (the 0.4 to 0.65 million). The PI gets no say over how the University spends the 0.5 million, and many have complained that far from supporting research, the University is using indirect costs to subsidize their own largess, beautifying buildings, building statues, creating ever more useless administrative positions, all without actually using that money how it’s supposed to be used: supporting research.

So it’s clear something had to be done about indirect costs. They were definitely necessary, if there were no indirect costs most researchers would not be able to research as Universities won’t allow you to use their space for free, and direct costs don’t always allow you to rent out lab space. But they were abused in that Universities used them for a whole host of non-research purposes.

There was also what I feel is a moral hazard in indirect costs. More prestigious universities, like Harvard, were able to demand the highest indirect costs, while less prestigious universities were not. Why? It’s not like research costs more just because you have a Harvard name tag. It’s just because Harvard has the power to demand more money, so demand they shall. Of course Harvard would use that extra money they demanded on whatever extravagance they wanted.

The only defense of Harvard’s higher costs is that it’s doing research in a higher cost of living environment. Boston is one of the most expensive cities in America, maybe the world. But Social Security doesn’t pay you more if you live in Boston or in Kalamazoo. Other government programs hand you a set amount of cash and demand you make ends meet with it. So too could Harvard. They could have used their size and prestige to find economies of scale that would give them *less* proportional indirect costs than could a smaller university. But they didn’t, they demanded more.

So indirect costs have been slashed. If this announcement holds (and that’s never certain with this administration, whether they walk it back or are sued to undo it are both equally likely), it will lead to some major changes.

Some universities will demand researcher pay a surcharge for using facilities, and that charge will be paid for by direct costs instead. The end result will be the university still gets money, but we can hope that the money will have a bit more oversight. If a researcher balks at a surcharge, they can always threaten to leave and move their lab.

Researchers as a whole can likely unionize in some states. And researchers, being closer to the university than the government, can more easily demand that this surcharge *actually* support research instead of going to the University’s slush fund.

Or perhaps it will just mean more paperwork for researchers with no benefit.

At the same time some universities might stop offering certain services for research in general, since they can no longer finance that through indirect costs. Again we can hope that direct costs can at least pay for those, so that the services which were useful stay solvent and the services which were useless go away. This could be a net gain. Or perhaps none will stay solvent and this will be a net loss.

And importantly, for now, the NIH budget has not changed. They have a certain amount of money they can spend, and will still spend all of it. If they used to give out grants that were 1.65 million and now give out grants that are 1.15 million, that just means more individual grants, not less money. Or perhaps this is the first step toward slashing the NIH budget. That would be terrible, but no evidence of it yet.

What I want to push back on though, is this idea I’ve seen floating around that this will be the death of research, the end of PhDs, or the end of American tech dominance. Arguments like this are rooted in a fallacy I named in the title: “if the government doesn’t do this, no one will.”

These grants fund PhDs who then work in industry. Some have tried to claim that this change will mean there won’t be bright PhDs to go to industry and work on the future of American tech. But to be honest, this was always privatizing profit and socializing cost. All Americans pay taxes that support these PhDs, but overwelmingly the benefits are gained by the PhD holder and the company they work for, neither of whom had to pay for it.

“Yes but we all benefit from their technology!” We benefit from a lot of things. We benefit from Microsoft’s suite of software and cloud services. We benefit from Amazon’s logistics network. We benefit form Tesla’s EV charging infrastructure. *But should we tax every citizen to directly subsidize Microsoft, Amazon, and Tesla?* Most would say. no. The marginal benefits to society are not worth the direct costs to the taxpayer. So why subsidize the companies hiring PhDs?

Because people will still do things even if the government doesn’t pay them. Tesla built a nation-wide network of EV chargers, while the American government couldn’t even build 10 of them. Even federal money was not necessary for Tesla to build EV chargers, they built them of their own free will. And before you falsely claim how much Tesla is government subsidized, an EV tax credit benefits the *EV buyer* not the EV seller. And besides, if EV tax credits are such a boon to Tesla, then why not own the fascists by having the Feds and California cut them completely? Take the EV tax credits to 0, that will really show Tesla. But of course no one will because we all really know who the tax credits support, they support the buyers and we want to keep them to make sure people switch from ICE cars to EVs

Diatribe aside, Tesla, Amazon, and Microsoft have all built critical American infrastructure without a dime of government investment. If PhDs are so necessary (and they probably are), then I don’t doubt the market will rise to meet the need. I suspect more companies will be willing to sponsor PhDs and University research. I suspect more professors will become knowledgeable about IP and will attempt to take their research into the market. I suspect more companies will offer scholarships where after achieving a PhD, you promise to work for the company on X project for Y amount of years. Companies won’t just shrug and go out of business if they can’t find workers, they will in fact work to make them.

I do suspect there will be *less* money for PhDs in this case however. As I said before, the PhD pipeline in America has been to privatize profits and subsidize costs. All American taxpayers pay billions towards the Universities and Researchers that produce PhD candidates, but only the candidates and the companies they work for really see the gain. But perhaps this can realign the PhD pipeline with what the market wants and needs. Less PhDs of dubious quality and job prospect, more with necessary and marketable skills.

I just want to push back on the idea that the end of government money is a deathknell for industry. If an industry is profitable, and if it sees an avenue for growth, it will reinvest profits in pursuit of growth. If the government subsidizes the training needed for that industry to grow, then instead it will invest in infrastructure, marketing, IP and everything else. If training is no longer subsidized, then industry will subsidize it themselves. If PhDs are really needed for American tech dominance, then I absolutely assure you that even the complete end of the NIH will not end the PhD pipeline, it will simply shift it towards company-sponsored or (for the rich) self-sponsored research.

Besides, the funding for research provided by the NIH is still absolutely *dwarfed* by what a *single* pharma company can spend, and there are hundreds of pharma companies *and many many other types of health companies* out there doing research. The end of government-funded research is *not* the end of research.

Now just to end on this note: I want to be clear that I do not support the end of the NIH. I want the NIH to continue, I’d be happier if its budget increased. I think indirect costs were a problem but I think this slash-down-to-15% was a mistake. But I think too many people are locked into a “government-only” mindset and cannot see what’s really out there.

If the worst comes to pass, and if you cannot find NIH funding, go to the private sector, go to the non-profits. They already provided less than the NIH in indirect costs but they still funded a lot of research, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Open your mind, expand your horizons, try to find out how you can get non-governmental funding, because if the worst happens that may be your only option.

But don’t lie and whine that if the government doesn’t do something, then nobody will. That wasn’t true with EV chargers, it isn’t true with biomedical research, and it is a lesson we all must learn if the worst does start to happen.

Exercise and shibboleths

I’ve been trying to lose weight and gain muscle for years. But despite being in the target Young Male demographic, I never listened to Joe Rogan, or Logan Paul, or any of the exercise/fitness influences. Part of that was that they just didn’t interest me. Part of that was that fitness is filled with a lot of pseudoscience, and as a scientist myself I could see that almost everything said online was tinged with nonsense and falsehood. Everyone is looking for “one weird trick” to get abs of steel and 4% body fat, which leads to a proliferation of voodoo practitioners giving terrible advice and selling you supplements.

I stayed away from online exercise discussions.

But while idly scrolling one day, I found a video by Dr Mike Israetel of Renaissance Periodization. And for the first time in my life, I’m hooked. I’m watching his videos, I’m trying to learn his techniques, I’m putting into practice what he say I should be doing.

I think a large part of this sudden switch is that Dr Mike seems to have legit credentials. A teaching record at Lehman College, a genuine publication history, this guy is clearly doing science, not voodoo. But I think even more than his credentials are his shibboleths.

Put simply, Mike Israetel says all the right words as a scientist to make me (a fellow scientist) believe he knows what he’s saying. There are certain words that started out in science but have reached the mainstream: anyone can talk about carbohydrates and calories. But few people know what a motor unit is, or can accurately talk about the immune system. Dr Mike is saying things that pass the smell test to me (I am a fellow biology but not an exercise scientist specifically), and that helps me believe him when he says things I might otherwise be skeptical of.

And those shibboleths… make me nervous. Because I know I’m not actually doing research, I’m not actually seeking out all sides of the debate and forming my own rational conclusions. There’s hundreds of hucksters selling you on “the best way” to do exercise, so am I trusting Dr Mike for all the wrong reasons? Maybe he knows his biochemistry, but his exercise science is dogshit. I’d never know.

And even if Dr Mike is truly giving me the most accurate, up-to-date information in the scientific literature, that information could be wrong, and I could spend my time following baseless advice and getting less fit than if I’d just trusted the gymbro with a 6-pack and pecs.

I haven’t looked for any advice outside of Dr Mike, because to be honest I don’t have the time or the background necessary to know if he’s *really* got the goods or is a huckster like all the others. I have the background to know he knows his biochemistry, but beyond that I’m lost. But as someone without much time to exercise anyway, I feel like latching on to a charismatic Youtube professor is at least better than latching on to any other charismatic Youtuber, and is hopefully better than flying blind like how I used to exercise.

Time will tell.