The Vatican Observatory has been around for almost as long as that, "now" is a pretty relative term.

Keep two things in mind. 1) Galileo (not killed, btw) was a contemporary of Machiavelli, in the days when politics and the church were totally intertwined. He also had made fun of the cardinal who later became pope in his books. 2) Lots happens in 2000 years of any institution, for good or ill. Things not only are seldom black and white at any given instant, but give people that long and they'll flip back and forth between the two repeatedly. So, judging the current state of things by past conditions is a fool's errand.

Sure. The Vatican Observatory and people who run it are directly in that space. One of the oldest astronomical institutes out there.

If you want to hear some thoughtful words about the intersection of faith and science, go watch talks or interviews by the last two directors, Br. Guy Consolmagno or Fr. George Coyne. You might not agree with their take on the "faith" side of things, but even noted anti-religion polemicist Richard Dawkins had a great conversation with Fr. Coyne (easy to find on youtube). We could all learn a thing or three from how they approach the interview, even if you don't care about the topic one way or the other.

Not quite. If the university hires a professor to lead that research who's not a citizen, it's an H1-B. No university can afford to pay $100,000 more as part of the hiring process. So, if the best research is being done by someone with the wrong passport, they're now not going to be doing it in the US. Is that really what we want as a country?

Especially stupid move considering that LIGO needs both antennae to function at all: it works because two waves are seen in the two detectors at about the same time. Otherwise, hard to tell what's noise. So, that move would most definitely waste a lot of money rather than save it.

JUNO's 100's of $M, not $B. DUNE's the multi-$B one, which is in the US, and being a large project in the US, is behind schedule and over budget (full disclosure: I work on that one). It's also not just China working on JUNO, but much of the rest of the world too. Except for the US, which won't fund participation in projects in China anymore.

But my main point: science works in spite of the repressive regimes in charge there (and now here). Some talking head can say wonderful things, but scientists have to actually prove that it works to other scientists. Xi can make a billion people study his speeches, and Trump can spout out a torrent of inanity that gets to scroll on Fox News chirons all day. While big chunks of the world just suck this up and grin, scientific claims get real scrutiny. JUNO's the Real Deal, it's a well done project that will teach us things, and fairly quickly.

In general, if you consider time dilation. For something with mass, approaching "c" slows time down. Something with no mass that's going "c" (ie, a photon) would have a stopped clock. In fact, this is how we know neutrinos have some non-zero mass, because we see them changing as they travel. If they had no mass, no neutrino oscillations.

This! Speaking as an actual Astronomer, WTF? Go name your business some other random word.

It was slated for Antarctica, because to see microwaves from the ground you need to be high and dry. That's cheaper than space (REALLY high and dry), but still not actually cheap. Chile was option #2 (and still not cheap, because remote high and dry) when the Antarctic infrastructure developed problems. Which still exist, and will need a lot of time and money to get right: there's still lots of stuff that needs done down there.

To be fair, CMB-S4 had been on hold and in serious trouble long before the current bunch of people took over the government. Had the election gone the other way, this was still a rather likely result for this particular project. Sucks, but this one's the least of the things we should be outraged about.

I'm curious what the fingerprints are, and if they have a recipe one can feed a paper to to see what gets flagged. For example, I've not used AI in any of my paper writing (not counting data analysis: ML has been a thing for decades, but that's probably not what they're talking about...), so my own set of papers would be a good control case for false positives.

This is pretty much the plot of The Three Body Problem.

This is a concern. However, when using SNIa as standard candles, you already have to compare their light curves to templates to calibrate out the fact that different white dwarfs are made of different stuff. A double-bang probably has a light curve very different than normal, as well as being rare: so I'd be surprised if they mess up the overall fit of thousands of SNe. That said: more fun stuff to figure out!

57% of NSF's budget has been cut. If you think that 57% of what NSF does is "DEI", then there's no use arguing with you.

NSF grants generally run for three years. So, another way of looking at this is that funding no new awards this year at all saves you 33% of the budget. And whack half of last year's awards before they finish. Then let the ones on their final year finish up to get results.

Also note that NSF has been kicked out of its offices (HUD's taking the building over), so they're going to have a hard time managing whatever's left anyway.

Because Bondi is also in charge of investigating and prosecuting federal law violations. So, nothing will happen. A good idea to move the justice dept into the control of the judicial branch, maybe?

It's called "dynamical friction". Not actual rubbing on things, but if you take an object moving along past a bunch of other objects, and they're all attacting each other via gravity, you get a net force opposite the direction of movement by the combination of all the "slingshot effects" from all the other bodies.

Wikipedia doesn't have a cartoon of this, if I only had a blackboard. Let's see if I can google up a cartoon.... Aha! This is 2025, of course there's a good youtube talk

about it.